


The Choice of Valentines

by K_dAzrael



Category: Fantastic Four (Comicverse), Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, Sex Toys
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-09
Updated: 2014-03-06
Packaged: 2018-01-08 04:00:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 26,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1128086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/K_dAzrael/pseuds/K_dAzrael
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She crosses one long leg over the other and folds her arms across her chest. “I know. It’s absurd and greatly inconvenient, for many reasons. One, you are my godfather, I’m sure there are places such thoughts are illegal. Two, you’re a despotic tyrant. Three, a supervillain. Four, you wear what is essentially a full-body chastity belt at all times. Five, you are my father’s age – which I imagine Freud would have something to say about.”</p><p>Futurefic starring DOOM and Valeria RIIIIICHARDS (guest-starring a Latverian milliner, a chocolate torte and a talking sex toy).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> One day I’ll write a pairing other people are interested in. One day.
> 
> My head-canon for Doom may be incompatible with actual canon.

Victor von Doom’s armored boots ring on the flagged floor, Valeria, at his side, walks soundlessly in sneakers, her steps weaving as she switches between gazing up at the stained glass windows and down at the blue-white light of her smartphone.

“The library of Doomstadt university,” he intones, “contains Europe’s finest collection of works on alchemy and natural philosophy.”

“I’m a physics major, Victor, we’re not big on dusty manuscripts.”

Victor sighs. He has never known anyone with less wonder in magic than Valeria Richards. Magic and science, Victor knows, are just different ways of manipulating and understanding matter. When he tries to explain this to Valeria she rolls her eyes, or crosses her arms and taps a foot, like he’s a tedious uncle regaling her the same old anecdotes again and again. She is the second most provokingly stubborn person he has ever met.

She gazes around the empty library, down the rows of gleaming mahogany tables towards the imposing oil portrait of Doom himself which seems to survey the room (and actually does, thanks to hidden cameras in its eyes). 

“Does anyone really study here?”

He turns his head to gaze at her. “What do you mean?”

“This is a college, right?”

“University. A ‘college’ is–”

“No, I mean, it’s a place of learning. There should be students.” She blinks at him. “You know – consulting books, cramming for exams. _Studying_.”

“Ah,” says Victor. 

“No-one actually enrolls here, do they? It’s another one of those weird Doomstadt follies you build – like the hat shop.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your serfs – sorry ‘citizens’ – are too poor to afford hats, and even if they could, they wouldn’t legally be allowed to wear them under your sumptuary laws. So why a hat shop?”

“Visiting dignitaries and their wives.”

Valeria laughs, a sound that is part incredulity and part pure, shimmering delight. “Alright,” she says, placing her hand on his arm, “give me your prospectus.”

“A whole university,” he says grandly, “all at your disposal. Resources ancient and modern at your fingertips. All under the tutelage of the greatest scientific mind of this or any generation.”

“Right,” she says, “but how’s your football team?”

Victor clasps his hands behind his back. “If you wish for there to be a football team, it can be arranged.”

She laughs again. “I’m going to put you down as my safety school, alright?” 

“No,” he says. “Doomstadt University is a place of wonder and arcane terror – it is no-one’s safety school.”

After a tour of the science wing, they walk down to the city’s main square and visit the fabled hat shop. The milliner behind the counter is as dusty as his wares and the look of fear and amazement passing over his face at their entrance is like he has been caught unawares by judgement day (which for a citizen of Latveria is close to a literal truth).

As he cringingly brings out the best of his outmoded fashions, Valeria tries on hat after hat, taking photos of herself.

“What is this one called?” she asks, fitting an elaborately-trimmed velvet headband with an attached veil to her head and admiring herself in a mottled mirror.

Victor repeats the question in Hungarian and translates the milliner’s stammered replies. “A french hood. Last popular in Europe around the 1590s, I believe.”

“Come to picturesque Doomstadt!” she types as she posts the resultant selfie to Facebook. “Where the Ren Faire never ends!” She shows him the post and he gives a grunt of mild annoyance. The device pings a few seconds later and she scowls at it.

“What?”

“Nothing, just my dad asking if I’ve been kidnapped again.”

“You’re friends with your father on social media?” Victor asks in an incredulous tone – he lives in a medieval fantasyland and even he knows that is deeply uncool. 

She rolls her eyes. “He insisted.”

Valeria Richards is seventeen years old, and like all second-generation geniuses, she has an odd combination of qualities that sit ill at ease with one another. A boundless confidence and knowing, adult way of talking belied by a very teenage desire to please. Yet, he is never sure how much of her teenage mawkishness is merely copied or feigned, because there is a dispassionate watchfulness about her (her scientist side, he supposes) and flashes of manipulative cunning (her nascent supervillain side, he sometimes flatters himself into hoping). 

He takes her next door to Doomstadt’s one and only dress shop and witnesses her delight at finding a red velvet gown that seems destined to be the french hood’s mate. She comes to dinner in it, still worn over her jeans and sneakers, and Doom reflects that the last time he had a guest in such queenly attire it was Loki of Asgard. He tells Valeria this and she almost chokes on her watered-down wine.

“Was he hot?” she asks. “As a woman, I mean?”

Victor considers the question. “It wasn’t his own body transformed, you understand – as I later learned, he had stolen it from the Lady Sif, a warrior of Asgard. She is generally considered a very handsome woman and he had chosen his attire to reflect her – assets.”

“Yeah, but it was _Loki_ , right? Did he hit on you?”

“I believe he did, although I took it in the spirit of his usual perverse glee. His brother the Prince Balder was rather more discomfited by the episode.”

“So you didn’t...” she wiggles her eyebrows which are blonde and thick.

“Bed the Norse god of trickery and chaos? No.”

“You’re no fun,” she tells him, seriously. “You are the most boring supervillain that ever lived.”

Victor finds he is genuinely hurt by this comment and has to fight the urge to list off his most daring and devious feats. Ridiculous – he doesn’t have to impress a teenager in a silly hat, even if she is his guest and his goddaughter. “And just what have you done in your short life that’s so outrageous?”

Having less self-control and dignity than himself, Valeria does start to list off her own adventures. He waves a gauntleted hand negligently, as if to suggest MacGyvering (whatever that is) a space-and-time-craft from junkyard parts is such a banal achievement as to be not worth mentioning.

“Well,” she huffs, “at least I’m not a weirdo shut-in.” Triumphantly, she adds: “I even have a boyfriend.”

Victor makes a derisive sound, but undeterred she brings up a photograph on her phone – a thing, he supposes, that might be a teenage boy, but equally might be hair caught in a drain.

“He lives in Canada,” she says.

“Of course,” Victor replies amicably. “They always do. So, what is so special about this boy, who, I assume, has a name?”

“Jake,” she says and he grimaces behind the mask. “I don’t know,” her eyes flicker from side to side – he wonders if she’s thinking, or inventing. “He’s funny, he makes me laugh.”

“And he’s in a band and plays the guitar?”

“How did you – oh! You’re making fun of me.”

“I try not to, Valeria, but you make it so incredibly easy.”

She chews her bottom lip. “I want to go and visit him this summer, but dad’s being an asshole about it.”

Victor von Doom briefly wonders what the threat scale in Reed Richards’ head looks like that his arch-nemesis and master of the dark arts ranks slightly below a scruffy-haired teenager. If he thought about this deeply enough he would be of a mind to be angry.

“Why are you going to college, Valeria?” he asks.

Her pale eyelashes catch the candle light as she looks up at him. “What do you mean – why shouldn’t I?”

“It won’t challenge you in the least. Wherever you choose, it will have no technology or facilities to match that you can find at home.”

She pushes her food around the plate. “To make friends, I guess. Stop being a kid who was raised by robot wolves.”

“And to get out from under your father’s shadow, I suppose?”

She frowns. “The thing about my father’s shadow is that it stretches.”


	2. Chapter 2

When Valeria comes home from MIT for her first spring break, Victor invites her out to dinner in New York. 

_Pozolata_ is a restaurant backed by the Russian mafia, catering almost exclusively to oligarchs, their families and entourages. They do not seem to regard Victor von Doom as in any way eccentric or demanding, and the private dining room is a well-appointed baroque monstrosity that he feels strongly will amuse Valeria, who is never tired of mocking the interior decor of his own castle. 

A waiter opens the door to admit her and she could not look more incongruous, standing in her jeans and sneakers beneath a crystal chandelier while the parallel mirrors provide a _mise en abyme_ where her smiling reflection goes on and on forever. Victor rises from his chair and she rushes forward, hesitates, then throws herself against him in an embrace. She smells like the cold spring air outside and Victor folds his arm around her, wishing just for a moment that he could make his armor melt away. 

“Victor,” she says, pulling back and turning. “I hope you don’t mind that I brought someone. This is Jeff.”

Victor notices that there is a third person in the room. A youth in a shirt of unbleached linen and a green corduroy waistcoat. He has dark, wavy hair, facial stubble, thick-framed glasses in an old-fashioned style and a general air of knowing himself to be attractive. He is holding a notebook against his breast as if it will defend him from whatever Doctor Doom might attack him with.

“I believe we will find room for him somewhere,” Victor gestures to the long table, spread with pristine linen and gleaming silverware.

When the waiting staff bring in the dishes Victor sits back and sips his wine.

“Would you like something to eat, Jeffrey?” he offers. “The _kholodets_ is supposed to be excellent.”

“What?” the youth says – simultaneously fearful and arrogant, somehow.

Valeria, who has a mouth full of some kind of dumpling, points with a silver fork. “meat in aspic. It’s pretty good if you can get past the whole looking-a-bit-like-cat-food-ness of it.”

“I’m a vegan,” ‘Jeff’ says. 

“Well then,” says Victor, crossing his arms over his chest, “Russian cuisine is not for you.”

“How do you eat with the mask on?”

Victor glares at him and drums his gauntleted fingers on the table-top.

Valeria laughs. “Dude. If it wasn’t for me, you’d be so dead right now. Seriously, there’d be a smoking hole where that chair is.” 

“Even Doctor Doom can’t just–”

“He can,” Valeria says. “He has spooky occult powers and diplomatic immunity.”

‘Jeff’ flips over the first few pages of his moleskine notebook and clicks a small silver pen. 

“What are you writing?” Victor demands.

“Notes. For my article – didn’t Val tell you?”

Victor turns his head to look at Valeria. “Socialist Society bulletin,” she explains. 

Behind the mask, Victor’s lip curls. “Socialism, really? That was an old student committee chestnut even in my day.”

‘Jeff’ tosses a lock of hair back off his forehead with a long, ink-stained finger. “I wouldn’t expect someone like you to agree with the philosophy.” 

“Someone like me?”

“A relic of feudalism.”

Victor is angry for a split second, and then he is amused. The whelp is pale and perspiring slightly, clearly drunk on his own daring and self-righteousness.

He places his armored fist on the table and leans forward in his chair. “I have known many like you, young man – deluded visionaries. Blind to their own weakness and insignificance. You dare criticise Doom, who could reach out and kill you with a thought?”

The youth recoils slightly, then says: “just because you could kill me, doesn’t make you right.”

Victor smiles at this. “Of course it does. Everything that is not power is just wasted breath.” He thumps his gauntlet on the table top and all the dishes rattle. “Stop writing that down! Doom did not give you permission to record this audience.”

“Why not? Don’t you want the world to know you’re a tyrant? The people – your people–”

Victor’s voice becomes low and dangerous. “What do you know of my land or its people?”

“I know that they suffer. That they are slaves in their own land.”

Victor laughs. “What is there in that? Almost everyone on this planet is a slave. In China, people toil over the little devices Westerners so obsessively buy and replace. In America, your ‘ninety-nine percent’ work long hours for little pay, services, or security. In Latveria, people are healthy and content. They do not breathe the fumes of industry; they live as their forbearers did: plainly, ignorantly, and happily.”

“They do seem happy,” Valeria agrees. “And they do love Victor. It’s sort of creepy, actually.”

‘Jeff’ raises his hands in a gesture of disbelief. “But... they have no autonomy, no choices.”

“No,” Victor concedes, “but then people don’t _want_ choices. They want rules, and higher powers to reward them for following them. Your society knows that, Jeffrey – it is fat, numb, infantilized... dazzled by the bright lights of audio-visual entertainment.”

‘Jeff’ pushes his glasses up his nose primly. “This isn’t my society – I don’t vouch for it.”

“No? Yet you seem to have done well by it. A prestigious college education – I take it, you are not at MIT on a _scholarship_?”

Valeria laughs. ‘Jeff’ shoots her a glare but she simply smiles, as if she expects everyone finds this exchange just as entertaining as she does.

“My past isn’t important,” ‘Jeff’ says, recovering some of his composure. “It’s what I do with my present, my future.”

Victor’s lip curls with contemptuous amusement. “Really? I’ll tell you what you will do. You will write this student rag. Then you will paint placards and go on a few marches. Then you will graduate, and you will do whatever it is your family does – law, I suppose?” Victor watches him through narrowed eyes. “No, nothing so noble – business, I think. Yes, daddy is a true-blue capitalist, isn’t he?” 

“They’re in advertising,” Valeria contributes, earning herself another glare.

Victor’s voice deepens and his eyes take on a manic light. “Few men rise above the conditions of their ancestors. Few break their moulds and dare to become something different. It is these few – and these only – who deserve to rule.” He thumps the table again and it splinters beneath his gantlet. “You may publish that in your paper. Now leave, while I, Doom, still allow it.”

‘Jeff’ gathers what is left of his dignity and rises from his seat. “Are you coming, Val?”

Valeria gestures to her plate. “Nope. Catch you at school, I guess.”

The youth’s nostril’s flare, but he leaves the room without another word.

“That was fun,” Valeria says pushing away her dinner plate and pulling her bag into her lap to begin rooting through it for something. 

“I’m glad you enjoyed yourself.”

“I was thinking of breaking up with him – you know, because he’s kind of a pretentious ass. And then I thought, why not say it with a terrifying Eastern European dictator?” 

Victor takes a fortifying gulp of wine. “What does that make me, in your scheme of things – your chaperone, your avuncular?”

“What century do you think it is, Victor? I just thought it would be nice for him – he gets a good story out of it, at least. To save face, because, you know, he dumped me for reasons of conscience.” She crinkles a blister pack and tosses a small white pill up into the air, catching in her mouth.

“In my day,” Victor laments, almost to himself, “young women did not take contraceptives at the dinner table.”

“Why not?” she asks. “Weren’t they invented yet?”

Victor crosses his arms and sighs. Meanwhile, Valeria casts her eye about the dining room. 

“This place is bizarre, Victor. It’s like Marie Antoinette exploded.”

Behind the mask, Victor von Doom smiles.


	3. Chapter 3

Victor is elbow deep in the chest cavity of a failed Atlantean clone when his systems light up with Valeria’s incoming call. He answers with a vocal command and says “Valeria, how is college life treating you?”

“Yeah, good,” she says breathlessly, she is on her way somewhere. “I mean, the social side of things is good. The classes are pointless – I’m doing twice the amount of credits I’m supposed to, but it’s still like being in kindergarten – not that I ever went. ‘Advanced’ calc – yeah, sure, why not paint by numbers, why not nap time? Oh, and the professors hate me.”

“Of course they do,” he says, voice rich with affection. “What are you doing with your summer?”

“Interning, traveling. Might swing by Europe.”

“Come to Latveria, then, for Doom’s Day.”

“When is Doom’s Day?”

“It is whenever Doom declares it to be.”

“Of course it is,” she laughs. “I’d love to come, Victor, but I’m kind of – I mean, can I bring someone?” 

“That depends on who it is. If it’s a male member of your family, for instance–”

“No, a friend. A boyfriend – my boyfriend,” she manages finally. “He’s called Josh.”

“Of course he is,” Victor says. “Well, any friend of yours is welcome in Latveria,” he adds, only a little begrudgingly.

“Are there Doom’s Day traditions I should know about?”

“It is traditional to give me a gift, but as you are an honoured guest in my country, there will be no public shaming if you fail to provide one.”

“I’m glad you have things to keep you busy, Victor,” she says sweetly. “See you June, maybe? No, July!” The phone cuts out but he is not clear on whether that constitutes a farewell among the youth of today, or if she fumbled the phone as she ducked and weaved her way through a hallway.

*~*~*

When Valeria and her companion exit the car he sent to the private airfield to pick them up Victor is standing on the castle steps with his green cloak rippling in the breeze.

‘Josh’ has cornflower blue eyes, fair hair and an athletic physique. He wears chinos and a bright blue polo shirt with an incongruous crocodile embroidered on the left pectoral and reminds Victor a great deal of Captain America. He visibly pales when he sees Victor: perhaps until this moment he hasn’t really believed there is such a person as Doctor Doom, or that Valeria, inexplicably, knows him.

“Doom welcomes you to Latveria,” Victor says, in the grand, threatening tone he uses to greet ambassadors.

Valeria grins at him and runs up to catch him in an embrace – a pointless gesture through the armor, but it brings her close enough that he can smell her hair and her perfume. 

Introductions are made and Victor squeezes the hand of ‘Josh’ much harder than he needs to before turning and striding into the castle to lead them in to dinner. 

‘Josh’ is silent at first, picking at his food, but Valeria talks enough for both of them – telling of their travel adventures so far inter-railing around Eastern Europe. 

“My God, Victor,” she says as he tops up her goblet (‘Josh’ does not drink). “I missed your wine. Why doesn’t Latveria export this stuff?”

“Latveria is agriculturally self-sufficient. It does not import or export produce.”

She props an elbow on the table and rests her chin on her hand. “Code for: you hoard everything an entire country produces.”

‘Josh’ stiffens and pales. That is interesting, Victor thinks: he doesn’t trust her.

“What do you do, Joshua?” Victor asks, mainly to see if he can make the youth curl up like a woodlouse.

“What do you mean, exactly,” he thinks for a minute and adds “your highness?”

“Only a prince is given the honorific ‘highness’,” Victor tells him, sharply. “A king is addressed ‘your majesty’.”

“Oh...” he says, blinking dumbly.

“Let him call you by name,” Valeria says. Her gaze is so direct it sparks something in Victor, making him feel that this is another form of experiment she has devised for him.

“Certainly not,” Victor says, adopting tone that suggests he is scandalised by the suggestion. “He may call me by my academic title, if he prefers.”

“I never asked you about that,” Valeria reflects. “Are you a medical doctor or a PhD?”

“Both.”

“Of course you are.” 

“I delivered you, didn’t I? And I named you.” He intends this reminder to put Valeria in her place but instead she grins and ‘Josh’ looks more uncomfortable than previously.

Victor turns to him. “You were about to tell me about yourself.” 

“I um, I’m not really that interesting,” there is another interminable pause. “Doctor.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” Victor says, because he will.

‘Josh’, clearly agitated, begins a halting ramble about his studies (he is a business major at University of Massachusetts), Greek Life and lacrosse. Valeria does not interrupt or help him, and the entire speech is a mix of desperation and utterly misplaced pride. The boy cannot be entirely lacking in wit if he made it to college, Victor supposes. Yet, there are those who are merely skilled at cramming predigested information into their brains...

“How did you meet my goddaughter?” he asks.

“It was at a frat mixer... you know, a party.”

“And you ‘hit it off’, did you?” Victor addresses ‘Josh’, but he’s looking at Valeria. 

“Yeah, I mean, I guess...”

“So, this is what passes for romance in this day and age.” 

‘Josh’ at least seems to grasp that this is not a question. He sits back and closes his mouth. 

“You must be tired,” Victor tells them. “I have chambers prepared, whenever you wish to retire. Separate rooms, of course,” he adds. “I am old-fashioned.”

*~*~*

The next morning Valeria comes down to the lab and asks Victor to take her out riding. ‘Josh’ has either, wisely, begged off this activity, or else she did not invite him in the first place. 

It is a cold, crisp day and snow lingers on the tops of the distant mountains. The snorts of Victor’s black charger wreathe in the air as he slows its canter, reining the animal back with a gauntleted hand as its dinner plate-sized hooves churn up the loamy soil. Valeria is in the tweed riding habit he gave her on a previous visit, and she has mastered her seat in the running gait that is unique to the native Latverian pony she rides.

“Go on,” Valeria says when they have left the castle keep.

“Go on, what?”

“Bitch about Josh. I know you’re bursting out of your armor with withering comments.”

“Doom is far above ‘bitching’, as you term it,” Victor maintains. “It is you I am concerned for. Perhaps the stresses of college have frayed your wits.”

“Oh, you don’t think he’s suitable?” Valeria enquires archly. “Dad really likes him. Calls him ‘sport’.”

“You should try to be less obvious in your attempts to bait me.”

“You are so arrogant, Victor. You really think I would meet and form a romantic attachment with someone, travel around with them for months, just to annoy you?”

“That’s the only hypothesis that makes some degree of sense. What else could you possibly want with him?”

“What do people generally want – companionship, conversation?”

“What conversation can you have with someone of his intellect?”

“He’s entertaining enough when he’s not scared stiff.”

“Oh? Are we to expect a forthcoming volume of his epigrams?”

Valeria laughs. “Well, you should see the guys at college who consider themselves smart. I feel like saying, ‘If you’re such a genius, how come laundry and bathing are such a damn mystery?’”

Victor could almost feel pity for those boys alongside his justified contempt – what are they to do, after all, with a woman of such confidence and an intellect that leaves each and every one of them sprawling in the dust? 

“If it is the case that the men of your acquaintance are either idiotic or unpalatable, why associate with any of them?”

“Why indeed? Maybe I should declare myself the monarch of a European city-state and lock myself up in a castle with only robots for company.”

“I prefer my own company to that of those beneath me, that is all.”

“Yeah, well, we can’t all be in glorious isolation. Some of us have needs.”

“Such as?”

“What do you think?”

“Oh. And does this... young man, fulfill those needs?”

“Some of them. Why shouldn’t he?”

“Blind enthusiasm is no match for skill, or so I find.”

“When was the last time you got laid, Victor? Was it this decade, even?”

“I do not understand your generation,” he says, all but ignoring the impertinence of her remark. “Why do you all imagine that the frequency with which you can get others to bed you is all that matters? To say nothing of sentiment or even quality.”

“Why are you always lumping me in with ‘my generation’? My peers all think I’m a weirdo, you know.”

“Don’t be ridiculous – you don’t have peers, Valeria.”

“Don’t you ever... don’t you get frustrated, that you live so much in your own head?” she rolls her shoulders as if she feels some manner of confinement. “I want to talk, sometimes, but I know there’s no-one who gets it – I’m not even sure there are _words_. That’s not how it works, when I understand things. I have some kind of... scientific synesthesia, you know? And everyone else is just so _slow_ , it doesn’t seem worth explaining.”

“That is why I prefer to work alone.”

“Yeah, but it’s too much, too – sometimes my brain is like when a computer crashes and all those little error boxes multiply all round the screen. So, I need to unplug.”

“A metaphor which in this case means...”

“Venture out of the realm of thought–”

“And into that of the flesh, I see.”

“Do you, now?”

Victor meets her gaze. “There are elements of magic which are – primal. Carnal.”

Valeria wrinkles her nose at him. “You make it _work_ , Victor? That is so sad it’s actually appalling.” 

“I wouldn’t expect you to understand,” he says, urging his horse on to take the lead.

They slow the pace as they mount a rocky incline which eventually levels out as they pick their way along a plateau overlooking the steppes. The sunlight spills rich and golden onto the land below, the fields dotted with toiling peasants in white caps and linen tunics, as picturesque as the subjects of a Dutch masters painting. Valeria shades her eyes against the glare and looks off into the distance to where she can make out trails of smoke rising from the chimney stacks of brightly-painted barrel-shaped caravans. The farmers have left a respectful border in their ploughing around the encampment – almost as if there were a forcefield protecting it. Perhaps there is – generated either by Doom’s magic or the no lesser force of his terror.

“Your people, Victor?” she asks. 

“The romani, yes.”

“Your relatives, I mean – are those them? I know your mother and father are gone, but you must have had cousins, uncles, aunts maybe. Did you never come back to find them?”

“All the family I ever cared for is dead and gone.” Seeming to echo his master’s restless mood, Bucephalus paws the ground with a feathery hoof, but Victor holds him at bay with one implacable hand. “I am not ashamed of my origins, my race or their culture. For giving me life and nourishment, and my mother-wit in magic, I will always honour and protect them where they dwell upon my lands.”

“But... do you ever wonder about what your life would have been like if you hadn’t lost your parents?”

“One of poverty and degradation under the old baron, no doubt. At least, until I grew skilled enough in my mother’s arts to overthrow him.”

“You think you would have ended up the same, then, in the long run?”

“I suppose your generation is too arrogant to believe in destiny.” He turns to regard her. “Why dwell on ‘what if’s?”

She shrugs. “Just a thought experiment. Different variables, different results.”

“And what are yours? Do you wonder what it would have been like if you had been born into a family of normal humans; if you’d been born dull and insipid?”

“Yeah, sometimes. I’d be much happier, probably, or more content, at least – stupid people generally are.”

“Stupidity is a choice, Valeria. If you covet a life of bovine contentment then marry your frat boy. Breed. Fill your life with little manual tasks, keeping yourself busy step by step, moment by moment, all along the road to ignominious death.”

He turns the horse’s head and spurs him on from standing into a canter. Valeria gathers up the reins of her grazing pony and urges him to follow Victor’s steed further up the hill and into the woods. Faster and faster they ride, bent low over the their steeds’ gleaming necks as if it has become a race, jumping the fallen branches they find in their path. As they emerge from the trees they slow again and for a long time the only sound is the snorting of the horses. Victor feels a freedom and exhilaration she has not known for a long time – he rarely ventures outside the castle, and it is sometimes easy to forget that whatever disappointments may befall him, he is undisputed lord of an unspoiled and prosperous land.

“Do you remember when you taught me to ride?” Valeria asks. “I was so excited. To me ponies were just something from a cartoon, not something real. My parents never let me do anything dangerous – which is such bullshit because just being around them was insanely dangerous – but they had this thing, this over-protectiveness. I guess because I was the only one with no superpowers. When I came here, or to the Latverian consulate when you were in New York – it was this whole other world. You let me do things, and if I messed up, or hurt myself – well, those were the consequences.” After a pause she offers: “I think about you when I’m in college. How you would teach if you were there – there’d be no safety goggles, no ‘best practice’, no retakes. There’d just be succeed or fail.”

He turns to watch her. “Is that how you wish it was?”

“Well, I imagine half the class would be dead by now, so I can’t wish that on them.”

“Sometimes I imagine what I would have been like if you had come to Doomstadt to study under me. What we could have achieved together.”

Valeria shades her eyes again to look back at the castle rising above the city walls in the distance. “What if, indeed.” 

*~*~*

Doom’s Day is announced at six AM over the citywide PA system. By nine the people have assembled in the main square, waving home-made banners and bunting and singing songs. Valeria’s Hungarian is basic at best, but she can catch the general drift of the songs is praise of their glorious protector and monarch and the hope that Doom will reign forever.

“It’s all very Nuremberg-y,” she comments, sitting at Victor’s right hand on the castle balcony to watch the parade. ‘Josh’, seated behind her, discreetly kicks her ankle. He is bolt upright on his own chair and white as a sheet, lips pressed into a tight line. 

“You dare compare Doom to that paltry fascist?” Victor retorts, hands clamped on the balcony rail as he gazes out at the turned up faces of his adoring people, so desperate in their search for his benediction and approval. “A small-minded fool with no notion of economics or tactics. His rhetoric, also, left much to be desired.”

“I can see tomorrow’s headlines now. ‘Adolf Hitler: Not Badass Enough, So Says Doom’.” This earns Valeria’s chair leg another anxious kick. 

Victor regards the crowd below, who are now beginning to chant – the refrain is discordant at first, but slowly gains in rhythm and coherence.

“Are they saying something about a queen?” Valeria asks.

As he turns to regard her, Victor’s eyes shimmer with amusement. “Wave, Valeria. Do not disappoint the good people.”


	4. Chapter 4

Victor is tired when Valeria next calls. A night in November and the cold and damp that sets into the castle has now seeped into his bones, making his wits and movements sluggish. A necromantic text he had paid handsomely for at auction in London has finally arrived, representing the end to his hopes that it contained the rune sequence he needed to complete the codex that would allow him to make contact with the extra-terrestrial realm more commonly known by the vulgar name of ‘heaven’. He turns as he always does in time of frustration and disappointment, to his robotics, but without gauntlets his fingers go numb, becoming stiff and immovable. Then, the screens of his laboratory light up, patching through Valeria’s number automatically. 

“Hey Victor,” she says. “Are you awake?”

“Evidently.”

“You sound tired. You should go to bed.”

“Did you telephone just to check if I’m awake and then tell me to get some sleep?”

“No,” her voice is drowsy and thick, as if she is drunk, or half asleep herself. “I was just thinking about you. I’m at the Baxter Building – home, I mean. Thanksgiving.”

“Ah. The prelude to the genocide of a proud native people. Such a worthy cause.”

Valeria sighs down the phone, her breath rattling against the microphone. “Family time with mom, pop and the Future Foundation,” she intones darkly. “Victor, you have no idea what hell is.”

“A very poor choice of words, my dear.”

“Sorry.” She heaves another sigh and he hears the rustle of bedclothes as she rolls over. The thought comes unbidden into his head of what she’s wearing. He’s disgusted at himself more for that the sentiment is clichéd than that it is prurient.

“I was looking through some stuff in storage today,” she continues. “Found dad’s notes from his college days. What was his obsession with integrated circuits and _lasers_ about, anyway? How very Bond villain.”

This raises a smile from Victor. “Cutting edge technology, Valeria.”

“Were they the scientific equivalent of a mullet and stonewashed jeans?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” 

“Anyway, point is, I found some photographs among the clutter. You were in one of them.”

Victor makes a sound somewhere between a grunt and a question. “Why would your father have a photograph of me?”

“It wasn’t a photograph of you, you see – it’s dad and some of his lab buddies. I guess Ben took it. Dad looks super-nerdy and awkward and about twelve years old. He’s wearing the world’s ugliest sweater vest.”

“I recall he had a large and varied collection of hideous knitwear.”

She laughs, a soft, intimate sound. “You’re in the background of the photo. Sitting on the edge of a desk, giving them a contemptuous glare, unsurprisingly. You’re wearing a white shirt rolled up to your elbows, grey slacks.

A faint memory stirs at the description. “How did you know it was me?”

“Well, your skin tone was what made you stand out in a room of the pastiest of white boys, but it was your eyes that I recognised. God, Victor – you were gorgeous, did you know that? You must have – you had those thick, kinked eyebrows that made you look all brooding and intense, and this wide, sensual mouth turned up in a sneer. Women must have thrown themselves at you with considerable force.”

“I was a dirt-poor foreigner on a scholarship and I hardly ever left the lab. Still... yes, they did – and men, too, for that matter – it was a persistent irritation.”

“Those poor kids,” she says. “The more cruelly you snubbed them, the more they must have wanted you.”

“I can hardly be expected to take responsibility for the idle longings of deluded fools.”

She swallows thickly – he can imagine the bob of her long throat, the thud of her pulse through the translucent skin. “Have you never felt that way; wanted someone beyond all reason or even hope?”

“No,” he says, though it is a lie several times over. His eyes go to the book that lies broken-spined on the floor. “I am not that man, any longer,” he tells her, meaning it as a sort of peace-offering. “All that youth, that vanity – it has all been burned away.” That is at least two kinds of truth, he thinks.

“Do you ever –” she shifts again, he imagined the lines the creased bed linen must have left on the flesh of her arms, the swell of her cheek. Her hair will be in a messy plait or knot – her beauty rendered profound by the effortlessness of youth. “Do you – have you ever shown anyone your scars? If you tell me, I’ll tell you something – anything you want to know.”

“No, I have not.” This is a truth, albeit an incomplete one. Valeria – Valeria the witch, the namesake he never speaks of – she used to make love to him in the dark, running her fingertips over his ravaged face to feel out the raised, keloid surface with the lightest, skimming touch. 

“Why do you wear the mask?” 

Victor could almost wince at the contrast between these two women who share the same name. The Valeria who is gone understood his strangeness and his reserve, and was herself fragile in inexplicable ways; she knew that in magic, to explore forbidden knowledge is to open up the self in return. The younger Valeria has no such fears or compunctions; she is determined leave him no mysteries. 

“Why do you think?” he asks – it is partly evasion, and partly that he wants to find out how well she knows him. 

She is silent for a long moment. “Dad told me it’s because you’re proud. You can’t admit you injured yourself through your own mistakes, so you conceal it with a mask. Like putting a panel over botched wiring.”

“Is that what you believe, Valeria?”

“No. I think if it was that simple, you’d just heal yourself – you could, couldn’t you?”

“I could.”

“I know you don’t hate the scars, or at least, they don’t mean failure to you. There is no failure for a scientist – a set of negative results still brings you a step closer to success, because when you know what doesn’t work, eventually you’ll find what does.” She pauses, sounding breathless. “You know that better than anyone – you rescued your mother from hell.”

“I did,” Victor agrees, he is gratified that Valeria believes this of him. For that he will tell her what she wants to know. “The armor is not to conceal or protect my mortal frame, it is the perfect representation of what I am, and what I have achieved. It channels my magic, it amplifies it with technology, and thus I am the superior of any sorcerer or human foe.”

“Still, why the mask?”

He pauses for a long moment. “Because of the ignorance of others and what they think scars and disfigurement mean. Doom would not be pitied.”

“Yes,” she says, almost a gasp. 

“Now, Valeria, what will you tell me? Something you’ve never told anyone. ”

She hesitates for a moment, thinking, or calculating. “I’m glad I don’t have powers.”

“You don’t believe intellect is a power?”

“You know what I mean. My family bend over backwards and tie themselves in knots – literally, sometimes – to convince me I’m special, too, and just as much a part of the team as Franklin. The truth is I never wanted to be a part of the Fantastic Four, or Five or Six – I don’t want to save the world, so I’m glad I can’t.”

“Anyone can save the world, just as anyone can damn it. What _do_ you want to do with your life?”

“I don’t know,” she makes a sound of drowsy frustration. “I’m graduating soon and I don’t know – I don’t know. I should be applying for things, I should be – something. There are so many things I could do, so why am I doing nothing?”

“When you don’t know what to do, it is often best simply to be still and... reflect.” Victor looks around the lab and only wishes he could learn to take his own advice. There is something about the role of godfather – mentor, friend, whatever he is to Valeria – that softens him and gives him patience. 

“I feel like I’m still a child – maybe it’s being back here, in my old room. Hashing out the same old arguments. God, why are super-powered geniuses so boring? Am I boring you, Victor?”

“You never bore me, Valeria – although sometimes you do exasperate me.” 

He hears more rustling – she is sitting up, he thinks. He imagines the covers falling from her chest. “You’re not like anyone else,” she says, and as simple and understated as it is, the compliment warms him. 

*~*~*

He comes to New York and invites her to tea at the Latverian consulate. She is different, he thinks, in some indefinable way. There is a sharpness to her – some new sense of purpose. He doesn’t ask her what it is, just watches her and waits for her to reveal it. He feels some answering change in himself – a sense that watching her move beyond her old patterns and habits enables him to do the same. 

She is wearing an artfully baggy cashmere sweater that hangs off one narrow shoulder and some new, more close-fitting variation on jeans and a pair of shoes with an impossibly high platform heel. They are so ugly and impractical he suspects they must be very fashionable indeed. She forks up a slice of rich, many-layered torte with quick, surgically precise motions, the morsels disappearing between her coral-glossed lips and behind her white, eerily straight teeth. Victor does not understand the American obsession with orthodontic work, the pursuit of the vapid, mass-produced smile of a shop mannequin. 

“No young man this time?” he prompts. “No witless, tongue-lolling admirers to parade in front of me?”

She sighs and set down her dessert fork. “I thought about getting a girlfriend, to see if that would make a difference.”

“To me, or to yourself?”

She makes a non-committal sound. “There’s a girl I’m working with on the CERN project who expressed an interest. Brilliant, funny, cute little pixie cut–”

“Whatever that is.”

“Amanda, she’s called – that’s Latin for ‘ought to be loved’.”

Victor makes a sound of annoyance at the implication her Latin might be better than his own. “But despite her accomplishments and the direction implied in her name, I take it you don’t?”

“It – no. It wouldn’t work. And I like her, so I don’t want to lead her on.”

“You don’t show so much compunction for the opposite sex.” He lifts a tall ceramic cup and sips the tarry substance that passes for tea in his home country. “So. Who or what is all this in aid of?” his gauntleted hand indicates Valeria’s high-fashion ensemble.

“You don’t think it looks nice?”

“It’s very striking,” he says, diplomatically.

“Are you asexual, Victor?” she asks, seemingly apropos of nothing. “I don’t mean to be offensive,” she clarifies. “It’s a real thing people identify as, and I just wondered–”

“I am not,” he replies, in what he hopes is a tone that forbids further enquiry.

“Ah. Gay?”

“No. Nor am I impotent, or in the grip of some bizarre fetish, if those are your follow-up questions.”

“Right,” her eyelids flicker, as if she is running the calculations again to locate a forgotten variable. “Is it that I’m not a magical brunette?”

“What?”

“You don’t find me attractive, and I mean – the other Valeria, Wanda Maximoff – it’s an obvious tend. A trend that, really, I think Freud would have a lot to say about. Not that he was really a scientist, but–”

Victor holds up a hand to command silence. “Why do you think I– no, wait.” There is a sudden flash of understanding – something incredible and yet blindingly obvious. “You are attempting to tell me what, that you are infatuated with me?”

“I don’t know. Infatuations end, don’t they?” she crosses one long leg over the other and folds her arms across her chest. “I know. It’s absurd and greatly inconvenient, for many reasons. One, you are my godfather, I’m sure there are places such thoughts are illegal. Two, you’re a despotic tyrant. Three, a supervillain. Four, you wear what is essentially a full-body chastity belt at all times. Five, you are my father’s age – which I imagine Freud would have something to say about, too.”

“Yet I do not age,” Victor objects, pointlessly. “A side-effect of some magicks which–”

“Six, you spell magic with a k and go on about it endlessly.” 

Victor leans forward so that the light coming through the high window falls across the eyeholes in his mask, highlighting the glimpses of naked skin around his eyes. “You haven’t mentioned my scars.”

She sits forward, one knee jigging up and down. “They’re one of the things I like. That’s perverse, isn’t it? I found myself staring at Josh’s perfect face wishing it was all fucked up, white and shining like candle-wax.” She spreads her hands, a gesture of exasperation, resignation perhaps. “So, that’s it. The whole story.”

“I see. What do you want me to say, Valeria?” 

“That I’m not crazy. That I am crazy, but there’s some occult remedy? I don’t know.”

Victor sits back and tents his fingers together. “This... love, desire, whatever it is you feel – it will pass.”

“Does yours?” As his eyes widen behind the mask she presses: “if you don’t let go of the people you love, why should I?”

“It isn’t the same. You are young–”

“Look, it’s not like I haven’t tried. I mean, those boys, they were handsome, right? Smart and well-formed. I should have been able to...” she sighs heavily. “Maybe it’s just a matter of wiring. I don’t think like other people do – I don’t make the same connections. Franklin always says my superpower is lateral thinking. Maybe my desires are all haywire too and there’s nothing I can do about it.” She scoops up the last piece of cake on her plate and licks a chocolate smudge from the corner of her mouth.

“I’m sure your desires are perfectly normal, Valeria.” Victor is stuck on benevolent advisor mode.

“I used to make Josh turn the lights out when we...” he expects a euphemism, but after a considering beat she continues, “fucked. So I could imagine you. Your broad shoulders, the way you smell like hot metal. Your mouth – I know it doesn’t look the same as it did, but the same shape, I imagine how hot it would be all over me. That’s not normal, is it?”

Victor has no reply to that. He watches her warily – he has had women try to seduce him before – unholy enchantresses and devious villains with sashaying hips and knowing smiles. Valeria is staring blankly ahead, her shoulders slumped as if in defeat.


	5. Chapter 5

The next Victor hears of his young admirer is by proxy. His screens flash to life as he is seated at the main operation console and the smug, hateful face of Reed Richards appears.

“Mister Fantastic,” he says, allowing the inherent ridiculousness of the name to become abundantly clear. “To what do I owe this... honor?”

“Doom,” he says, without pleasantries. “Leave my daughter alone.”

“Interesting,” Victor leans back in his chair. “What makes you think I have done otherwise? Or is this a threat you are issuing to every adult male on the planet, one by one?”

“I don’t know how you’ve done it,” he continues, “and don’t think I haven’t had her checked for mind-control chips and unholy enchantments...” 

“You are beginning to _offend_ me, Richards. If you are so bored and unoccupied that you wish to end the détente between us and resume hostilities–” 

Richards’ eyebrows are drawn together in a childlike look of bafflement, he gazes off to one side and rifles through some papers, then seems to recall what he’s supposed to be doing and to whom he is talking.

Victor smiles to himself behind the mask. “You are pathetic, Richards. You’ll never gain any insight into your fellow humans until someone gives you an algorithm for it. Then, perhaps, the rest of us will finally have a place in your streamlined world of technological wonders.”

“That’s rich coming from you, Victor. All you know about people is how best to manipulate them and grind them under your boot heel,” he rubs his eye, looking older and more tired than Victor can recall having seen him. “I was never happy about Valeria seeing you – but Sue thought it was harmless. Sue believes, as I never have, that there’s really something to all your claims of old world honor. Maybe she even thought there was some good in you, after all, and Valeria would bring that out – somehow.”

“And now? What do you believe of me?”

“I think you were playing some kind of absurdly long game just to get at me.”

Victor laughs richly at this. “Oh, Richards – your folly and vanity really know no bounds.” 

“Do you deny it then?”

“Deny what?”

Richards scowls at him in what he must imagine is a forbidding way. “Stay away from New York, Doom.” He leans away from the screen and then ducks back into shot to add, somewhat anticlimactically, “... and stay away from Massachusetts, too.” 

The transmission cuts out before Victor can take a breath to utter a scathing retort. 

*~*~*

Deep within Castle Doom, behind countless sets of security doors, are a series of interconnected rooms, radiating from one central chamber like the spokes of a wheel. The inner sanctum is Victor’s own private chamber; a windowless room in which he sleeps, when necessary. It connects to the armory, where Victor stores, repairs, dresses and divests himself of this second skin; a dressing room in which he keeps ceremonial cloaks and clothing; a bathroom; a private library and study; and an anteroom in which he performs various private acts, receiving certain high-clearance communications and eating: an action he can accomplish only with the face-plate of his armor removed. 

Victor is is in this last room when Valeria calls him on her birthday. He wears only the lightweight bodysuit that provides a barrier between the armor and his vulnerable human flesh and the air of the castle is cold, almost abrasive against his scars. He disables the camera of his own console before hitting accept, but Valeria’s shows the interior of a messy dorm room littered with teetering piles of textbooks and abandoned coffee cups. She is wearing an over-sized t-shirt and her hair is pinned up in a knot, staked through with biro pens. 

“What does this do?” she asks, holding up the lid of the package he sent her. “And how did you get it through customs?”

“If you can’t work those things out on your own, then I’ll be sorely disappointed in you, Valeria.”

She leans closer to the camera and grins. “Wait – you’re naked, aren’t you?”

“What?”

“Your voice sounds different. You’re not wearing the mask, right?”

“Don’t be impertinent. What did you tell your father about me?”

“Hmm?” 

“He’s under the impression I have misled or... corrupted you in some way.”

“God, I wish. All you need to know about that is that my brother is a telepathic tattletale.” She places the package aside on her rumpled single bed. “Hey, want to see what one of my dorm-mates bought me? You’ll either be amused or murderously angry.”

“Intriguing.”

Valeria ducks out of shot for a moment and returns with a long, rectangular box. “So first, you should know that I haven’t said anything about you to the person who gave me this, but she knows I know you, and I guess she thought it would gross me out – or scandalize me, or something – to find out they sell these.”

“Sell what and who is ‘they’?”

“So, apparently there is this company that specializes in ‘erotic novelties’ and they have this range of ‘metahuman massagers’...” she holds up the back of the box and shows him the lurid copy. “See, I’d have thought they only do heroes, but apparently not. There’s a Loki one, look, the clit stimulator is shaped like the horns on his helmet–” she makes an obscene bunny-ears gesture in case he can’t imagine the feature for himself.

Victor does not at all like where this is going. Valeria opens the bottom of the packet and slides out the object within, holding it closer to the camera where he can see it. The base is the green of his cloak, the shaft part is the silver-grey of his armor and studded with what look like rivets, but are probably silicone rubber.

“Ta da!” Valeria grins. “The Doctor Doom dildo.”

“My body is not actually made of metal,” he observes, surprising himself with how reasonable he sounds, “if that’s the idea.”

“Yeah, I don’t think realism is what they’re going for. It’s more sort of... artistic licence. The Namor one is covered in green scales and shaped like a dolphin penis, I think... don’t ask me how I know what a dolphin penis looks like.” She turns the toy in her hands around, apparently to give him the benefit of seeing its full attributes. “This one has a set of sound-bites you can play: ‘fear the wrath of Doom!’ and so on. Want to hear?”

“Certainly not.”

“Just imagine – some guy out there has ‘voice of Doctor Doom dildo’ on his CV.” She squints at the back of the box again, the toy at half-mast in her hand. “Unless... they wouldn’t have copied it off the news or something, would they? Either way, you should probably sue the company.”

Victor will do more than sue them, he thinks. When he finds out where they manufacture these abominations he will convert the factory into a smoking crater.

“You’re annoyed, aren’t you? You know, most men would probably be flattered–”

“To have their life’s work turned into a disgusting novelty?”

“By the idea that women pleasure themselves to the thought of them.” She looks down at the object in her hand, setting the box aside to run her fingertips over the bumpy protrusions. Victor finds it unsettling – the whole thing is deeply unsettling. 

After a pause, Valeria begins, musingly: “the earliest form of recorded magic – sympathetic magic, right?”

“Correct.”

“Those little fertility figures in clay – given rounded stomachs or a phallus. What was the idea behind that?” 

“I suppose that, in some way, the doll is a second self in miniature – an ideal self, that can confer its qualities onto the maker or owner.” 

She tilts her head to one side. “And voodoo dolls – it’s the same thing, right? – only malevolent.”

“In that the subject it represents feels the effects of the action, yes.” Victor has always wanted Valeria to take an interest in magic, but this is neither the time nor the place for such disquisitions. 

She gives the toy another lingering caress “So, if I–”

“No,” he says, adamantly. “No.”

Valeria shifts from cross-legged onto her knees. Her long thighs are starkly pale against the blue bedspread. She wets her lips and her eyes are bright and eager. “Aren’t you even mildly interested – scientifically?”

Sometimes when Victor performs an incantation the words come with a special sort of inevitability, running off his tongue unbidden – it is almost as if the words speak him, rather than the other way around. As he takes a breath he thinks it is to say something curt and dismissive, but by the time he opens his mouth the intent has changed, and his speech is thick with sudden desire. “What is your hypothesis, Valeria: that the sensations are, in some sense, magically transmissible; or that you pleasuring yourself with that... crude effigy, can make me compelled to perform the same office?”

“I’m prepared to, you know, explore both avenues.” She twitches her eyebrows. “Exhaustively.”

“That is obscene,” he says. He means it to sound forbidding, but it doesn’t.

She leans forward and speaks in a disjointed rush: “I’m going to – you can terminate the call, or you can keep talking to me – but I’m going to–”

“Valeria, I don’t think...”

“I’ve done it before,” she says breathlessly. “When I called you at thanksgiving, I was touching myself, did you know that? Just idly at first, but listening to your voice – by the time I hung up I was so close.”

Victor is flesh and blood after all, underneath everything else that he is – his desires, as he himself has protested, are nothing aberrant. Valeria is young and beautiful and dear to him. How should he not be moved by the thought of her – thinking of him – with her hand working between her thighs? 

“Show me,” he says. 

Valeria pushes her hair back off her face and pulls down the t-shirt on the side where it has slipped off her shoulder to display one of her small, upward-tilted breasts. She raises her free hand to her mouth and wets her fingertips, then trails them over her pink nipple, biting her bottom lip and looking from under her eyelashes as if she can meet his gaze. It is false and coquettish and for a moment Victor wonders if this generation are so caught up in pornographic displays of pseudo-lust that they have lost all knowledge of what pleasure is. 

“No,” he says, sharply. “Not what you imagine it pleases me to see – what pleases _you_.”

“Victor. You should know that the subject’s very knowledge that they are being observed inhibits or changes their behaviour. Are you really asking me to ‘act natural’?”

“No. Simply bring yourself to orgasm as quickly and functionally as you can with me watching. It’s a perfectly reasonable request.”

She laughs. “Hands only, or can I use the toy?”

“You may use whatever aids you see fit.”

“You’re a very generous lover, Victor – I can tell that already.” She moves to the edge of the bed, closer to the camera and leans back on one elbow. Her t-shirt rides up and gives him a glimpse of the apex of her thighs, still in shadow. She is not wearing underwear. 

Her hand covers the area and moves in a light, teasing motion. “I don’t know how long this part usually lasts,” she says, her eyes closed. “I’m usually drifting off to sleep or still drowsy in the morning. And it depends what I’m thinking about, how vivid the fantasy is.” 

He is about to tell her that it isn’t necessary to narrate the experience, but thinks better of it. She arches her back a little and the shirt rides up further, allowing more light to fall on her mons pubis – the glimpses he can see through her fingers show it to be almost entirely hairless – another odd aesthetic choice modeled on the shop mannequin, he thinks. Her middle finger parts her labia, showing the dusky pink of their interior, like the inner petals of an orchid. He can hear how wet she is and see the moving finger shine. She turns her head and the extreme perspective highlights the rapid movement of her chest, the flicker of her eyelids. “There,” she gasps, “that’s enough.”

She sits up and smiles, pushing her hair back again. It is damp around the nape of her neck and sticks. She looks oddly wholesome, he thinks – unassailably beautiful in her pleasure and confidence. She reaches out and picks up the toy and he can see the muscles of her smooth inner thighs tremble as she places the blunt head of it against the opening of her vulva. Her eyebrows come together and her head tilts back, she gasps softly as she pushes and the toy slips into her – perhaps a third of it. He wonders if it hurts her and he almost tells her to stop, that she has proved her point, but no – that expression is not pain.

It is garish silicone, but he can imagine what it would look like flesh – what she would look like as he – 

“When we fuck,” Valeria says, her voice a little tremulous as she pushes it deeper, pulls it, glistening, back out, “it’ll be in the dark, won’t it?”

“If,” he says, carefully – uselessly. “Yes.”

“You’ll remember this, won’t you?”

“Yes.”

Valeria clenches her thighs to keep the toy in place and rolls over onto her front, then rising a little, just on one knee, she reaches back to resume the motion. The view is both less and more from this angle – the area shadowed, but the stretch of her labia around the toy more pronounced. At first he thinks it is merely another attempt to display – to assume an obscene, animalistic pose she imagines he will like, but her hand moves beneath her and she jerks and shudders against the bed clothes – this is what Valeria likes, what stimulates her. It is the intimacy of that knowledge that arouses him, more than the view. His hand shifts on top of the thin layer of synthetic cloth, adjusting his prick to lie up against his hip – it aches with restriction and drawn-out arousal and he no longer knows what he is waiting for, why he cannot simply give in and touch himself – except that it would be a distraction, and he wants to see and take in every second of this, to burn it onto his retinas and sear it into his memory.

“Victor,” she pants. “I’m so close, I need you to tell me – oh, are you naked, are you _hard_ –”

“Under my armor,” he says. He gets no further, because it is enough – she shudders and jerks in orgasm, then gasps and slumps on the bed. After a moment’s stillness she rolls over, letting the toy slip out of her in what seems a surreally slow and obscene moment. She pushes her hair back from her face and rolls onto her side to face the camera again, her chest heaving under the sweat-damp cotton and one loosely-curled hand pressed between her thighs.

She laughs, breathlessly and scrubs a hand over her face. “That was wild,” she says, that exhilarated, wholesome smile again – maybe this generation really does know something about pleasure, after all. “God, I haven’t been that turned on in – well, maybe ever. Was it good for you, Victor?”

“You are magnificent, Valeria,” he says, although he expects she knows it.

Fingers tease out her messy bangs. “Did you finish? You didn’t, did you? Can I listen while you touch yourself? Will you send me a picture of – no, no wait, I want to feel your dick before I see it, I want trace the shape of it with my tongue.”

Victor unzips the bodysuit all the way down his front, lets her hear the rasp. He grunts softly as his hand finally gets around the base of his prick and starts to stroke. 

Her tongue swipes over her top teeth as her eyes sharpen with a look of thoughtful intent. “I’m good at it, Victor.”

“Yes,” he agrees, a little breathlessly. “I’m sure you are.” He imagines tracing the line of her jaw with his bare hand, his thumb pressing on her bottom row of teeth, her mouth opening, pink and eager.

“Are you big?” she asks. “Bigger than the toy? I bet you are. I always imagine everything about you is – your hands and your broad back. I guess you could be a ninety-nine pound weakling under the suit, but I don’t think you’d allow that.”

“No,” he agrees, tensing his jaw; his hand moves faster. 

“I close my eyes,” she says – and she does, stroking her hand down her neck, “and I imagine the weight of you on top of me, wrapping my legs around your waist. I can’t move and you’re so deep in me...” 

He does not make a sound as he comes – he holds his breath, but then lets it out in an uneven shudder.

“Victor,” she says, warm and thrilled – pleased with herself, as well she might be.

She rolls over the bed, giving him another glimpse of her pert, athletic behind. She has retrieved the package he sent her. 

“Oh,” she says, “it’s a puzzle box, isn’t it?” She turns the metallic cube over in her hands, it flickers and lights up. “Home-made, even – your soldering is so neat. And if I open it?”

“There’s a real present.”

She grins expansively at the camera. “Thank-you. Best birthday _ever_.” 

Victor – baffled, weary, covered in his own semen – can think of no adequate response to this. “You’re welcome,” he says.


	6. Chapter 6

Victor steps out of the ambassadorial car onto the sidewalk outside the Baxter Building and waits for the driver to scuttle up the front steps and press the buzzer. Humans are so unreliable, Victor thinks, as the noisome New York wind ripples his cape. 

The chauffeur has a long exchange over the intercom. Victor looks around him at the pedestrians – the Americans in their ugly, drab, shapeless clothes. Cargo shorts and polo shirts, taking pictures of the legendary home of the Fantastic Four. He takes some comfort in the thought that the magnetic forcefield generated by his armor will blur all their holiday snaps beyond recognition. 

The chauffeur finishes the intercom debate and descends again, bowing in obeisance to Doom and almost tripping over his own highly-shined shoes before halting on the bottom step with his hands clasped in front of him and his eyes respectfully lowered.

The front doors open with a soundless, futuristic glide and Valeria clatters out followed by her father’s head on the chewing gum-string of his neck. They are arguing so rapidly it is difficult to interpret either, but it seems to be a stichomythic exchange of clichés. “Not under my roof,” he catches, and “old enough to make my own decisions!”

“Good evening, Richards,” Victor says, pleasantly. “Valeria, you look exquisite.” The compliment is partly to vex Richards, and also simply because it is true: she is wearing a floor-length gown of smoke-coloured silk. The matching wrap has fallen from one of her arms and revealed the full extent of her naked back. Her hair is wound up in a sleek chignon and square-cut diamonds sparkle in her ears. 

When the rest of Reed Richards’ body belatedly catches up with his head, he turns to regard Victor with an expression of anger his nemesis has never seen before, even when he had been threatening the existence of an entire city or planet.

“If you think I’m going to let you–”

“Don’t even start, dad,” Valeria tells Reed as she catches Victor’s arm and tugs him. “You either, Victor.”

“Doom does not engage in petty domestic squabbles,” he says. It is very entertaining when other people are angry and he is the epitome of calm. He steps to one side and holds out his hand to assist her into the car. 

“Don’t say a word,” She says as he climbs in next to her and the driver shuts the door. 

Victor glances at her sidelong and the car begins to move.

“Shh!”

“I said nothing.”

“I can hear you being smug.”

“My arch-nemesis is vexed and I am not permitted to enjoy the experience?”

“Jesus, Victor. He’s not your ‘arch-nemesis’. That’s not even a thing.”

“It is so. It was ‘a thing’ long before you were born, Valeria. Why else would he be so hysterically displeased by our... continued intimacy?”

“Because he’s a childish, dictatorial asshole, that’s why.” A tear escapes from the corner of Valeria’s eye.

“You are upset,” he says, reaching up to dry it with a corner of his cloak. 

“I’m angry,” she bites her bloodless bottom lip and stares straight ahead at the smoked glass partition.

“At Rich– your father?”

She makes an emphatic gesture with her hand (upon which, he notes, Cynthia von Doom’s ring sparkles – so she did get the puzzle box open). “He doesn’t care, you know, until the exact moment he decides he does? Until it’s fucking convenient for him... and then it’s all, ‘pay attention to me and acknowledge how much I love you. Let me prove it by telling you what to do.’ Like I’m an experiment, or a machine in need of calibration. He probably has it marked in a planner somewhere: ‘essential child maintenance works’.”

“It is my understanding that fathers are often... overly protective of their grown daughters.” It is not Victor’s intention to defend Richards, of course, but he would like Valeria to be less upset.

“He’s like that with my mother, too. I don’t know what makes me angrier – how he treats her, or that she lets him.” She bites her lip again, very pale except for two pink spots on her cheeks. “Sometimes I get angry because I know I’m just like him.”

“If you were, Valeria, I should be sensible of it.” 

“Would you, now?” she eyes him thoughtfully. “Are you sure the girl-package isn’t just a distraction?” She gestures to herself with a downward wave.

“It would be unnatural indeed if you were nothing like Ri– your father. You have his eyebrows, for instance, and exactly the same manner of arching them when you are deep in thought, or excessively pleased with yourself. Your high cheekbones too – your face has a rather more severe, masculine beauty than your mother’s.”

Valeria laughs softly and twines her arms about his, resting her cheek on his shoulder. 

“Otherwise,” he continues, “I see nothing alike. Your intelligence is far superior to his, and you have a reflectiveness he lacks.”

“Victor, you old flatterer!”

“Doom does not flatter. Doom is objective and accurate in all things.” 

She hugs his arm tighter – he can’t feel it, of course, but he can see the muscles in her arms constrict. “Alright, I believe you. How about we blow off this ambassadorial shindig and you tell the driver to take us back to your consulate home-from-home. Then you carry me upstairs and f– make love to me... for the next,” she glances at her watch, “four hours until I have to be home for this bullshit family dinner thing?”

Victor is sorely tempted. He pulls her against his chest and lowers his head to catch the scent of her perfume. “I would dearly like to, Valeria – and I promise you that very soon, I will. Yet for the moment... Latveria’s business must come before the pleasure of its ruler.”

“Agh,” she says – possibly a sound of frustration, but possibly because he is squeezing her uncomfortably tight. He relaxes his hold and allows her to regain her upright posture. “Such a tease. It’s lucky for you that I cannot resist your charms.”

Victor lays his arm along the back of the seat, brushes her bare shoulder with the tip of his little finger. “I will find a way to repay you.”

She grins. “Wait, is Victor von Doom offering me sex in return for services rendered?”

Victor grunts and turns his head away. “Now you have made it sound tawdry.”

“So, what am I supposed to do, beyond play arm candy?”

“That much you will soon grasp for yourself. It is a gathering to encourage and celebrate cooperation between the world’s most technologically advanced nations. Fortunately, the United States of America is hosting – otherwise I’m not sure it would have been invited.”

“Most technologically advanced, you say?” Valeria sits back and then her eyebrows do that infuriatingly-reminiscent-of-Richards arch. “Wakanda,” she says. “Victor – are you plotting to get hold of some vibranium?”

Victor crosses his arms over his chest and says nothing, though behind the mask he is smiling.

“So you want me to cosy up to T’Challa because my dad was in The Avengers with him for five minutes – and what, give you a character reference?”

“It is well known that Wakanda limits its supply of vibranium and refuses to favour any nation with what might be termed an ‘unfairly beneficial amount’.”

She thinks for a split second. “Oh, I see! So who else is going, and what do you have on them that you can blackmail them into handing over their share of the world’s most precious metal?”

Victor tents his fingers together and narrows his eyes. “That, Valeria, is what we will endeavor to probe and discover.”

She smoothes her hair and favours him with an exhilarated smile. “Sounds like a fun experiment.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry – there's more, there will be more! I just needed to get these first 6 parts off my chest. It was getting too ridiculously long to handle.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guest starring Bentley-23 because reasons! Right, so I have another big chunk of this on my laptop, but I started writing it all backwards and basically I am a terrible person – this shortish bit will have to tide you over until I sort myself out. Don't worry, there is porn.

Victor steps onto the pavement before the Carlyle Hotel and holds his hand out to assist Valeria from the limo. She puts a hand against his chest to steady herself and then gives him a knowing smile as she takes his arm. “Shall we?”

The function room is almost aggressive in its elegance: art deco with acres of black and cream marble. Window panes arranged like a translucent Mondrian canvas look out onto New York’s skyline in the fading afternoon light. It would almost be pleasant were it not for the not-so-subtle looming presence of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents at every exit, tapping their ear-pieces and speaking into their sleeves.

“I’m going to get a drink,” Valeria says. “Make some small-talk – I assume that’s what you brought me for, since you yourself are incapable of saying anything that is not monumental and grandiose?”

“True,” Victor agrees. “Doom’s utterances are always lapidary.”

“Hey look, there’s your best frienemy,” she says, indicating the far side of the room where Namor the Sub-Mariner stands with his arms crossed and sweeping the assembly with his contemptuous glower like a naturist Mr Darcy. “Why don’t you go and cheer him up while I see what I can charm out of your fellow diplomats?”

“Very well.” He feels the loss of pressure from his arm as she breaks away and as he watches her moving through the room, he notes the furtive, callow glances men give as she passes.

“Well well,” says Namor when Victor eventually deigns to join him. “I thought you were in hibernation, Victor.”

“Doom is never idle, Doom merely bides his time.”

“Mmm,” says Namor, “if you say so. Well, what do you make of this little shindig? ‘Innovations and Brightening Futures’.”

“It is very amusing when the Americans believe they are being... _subtle_ ,” Victor gestures broadly to the room.

“Yes, if they were any sharper one imagines they would cut themselves, as the old land saying goes.” Namor narrows his eyes. “Your... companion – Susan Storm’s girl, is it not?”

“Susan Richards,” Doom corrects, just to annoy him. “She did take her husband’s name, after all.”

“How old is the small fry now?”

“Valeria is twenty years of age.”

“How time flies for humans. It seems like just yesterday she was a nosy little brat, always getting under her mother’s feet with that whinging brother of hers.”

“I can only assure you that she is now every inch a woman.”

“You would know, would you?” Namor looks at Doom, speculatively, and then back over at Valeria, where she stands charming the Japanese Ambassador with a bright smile and a look in her eyes like she’s considering if he has anything worth pickpocketing. “I don’t see the attraction. There is a sort of coarse resemblance to her mother, I suppose, but she lacks the sweetness of Susan’s demeanor – yes, there’s something cold and calculating about that one.”

“Oh, you don’t find those qualities attractive?”

“I don’t find anything about her attractive,” Namor retorts haughtily, folding his arms over his incongruously bare torso. “Still, I wish you whatever joy you might take in such a clumsy, inexact likeness.”

“Alas, Doom does not share your fascination with utterly disinterested women.”

Valeria appears at his elbow and offers a him a glass. “Champagne, Victor? Hello Namor, how are you?”

“The prince was just commenting on how you’ve grown, Valeria.” Doom sips the wine and makes a sound of distaste. “This is sparkling wine, not champagne. New world trying to pass itself off as old – seems to be quite a theme today.” 

Valeria takes the flute and shrugs, draining it herself before planting it back on a passing waiter’s tray.

“Yes, well, this has been charming,” Namor says, giving them both a cool look from beneath his arched brows. “I do have three-fifths of the earth’s surface to govern.”

“You’re not going to stay for the speeches?” Valeria asks. 

“Oh, I think I’ve seen all that needs to be seen, don’t you? Until next time our paths cross, Victor.”

Victor gives a gracious incline of his head and Namor turns and makes his exit. 

“Does he walk around almost naked just to make people super-uncomfortable, do you think? Is it a form of Atlantean passive-aggression?” Valeria asks, taking Victor’s arm and guiding him towards a more secluded area of the room.

“Does it make you uncomfortable, Valeria? I rather find him admirably statuesque.”

“The nearly-naked thing, no – the relentless hitting on my mother, yes.”

“At least one of his ex-wives was a sea monster. I imagine your mother must have made a rather striking impression in comparison.”

“What kind of sea monster – are we talking... tentacles?”

“I shudder to think.”

“Freaky.” They come to a halt to where they are partially concealed by a column.

“Well?”

“The American government has wrangled 10 kilos of pure vibranium out of the Wakandans. They’re going to tell us it’s half that when they give their little show and tell later.”

“Interesting – and you managed to glean that in the space of five minutes?”

“Don’t be silly, Victor – I knew that much before we even came here. Onome is a terrible liar – I can read her tells even over Skype.”

“I see,” says Victor. “And was this specific reconnaissance for this event, or just part of your general plate-spinning?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, as for the purposes of this evening I’m apparently just a bimbo in a three-thousand dollar dress.”

“Oh? So what were your little chats about?”

“Finding out what other people know or claim not to know by pretending to know absolutely nothing.”

“Well next time one of these elder statesmen tries to paw you might mention I have access to several undetectable poisons.”

“Not sure how I’ll drop that neat little factoid into conversation. Still, it is very noble of you to defend my honor, Victor.”

“Doom is the pattern of princely virtues.” Victor gestures towards the hall, into which the ambassadors are gradually beginning to filter. “Shall we?”

As they move through the room Victor notes with satisfaction the crowds drawing back from him, as shoals of fish do in the presence of a shark. Ordinary people ( _peasants_ , his mind supplies) do not look at Doctor Doom directly – rather they perform a very pointed not-looking, which nonetheless shows the flickering whites of the corners of their eyes. Often he can scent the sickly musk of cold sweat and sometimes he even feels their perverse buzz of excitement – people ( _peasants_ ) continually wonder if and when Doom will start blowing things up – and whether or not they want him to. Humans, as Victor’s quondam ally from Atlantis would doubtless agree, are foolish and contradictory creatures. 

*~*~*

“Hot fusion my ass,” Valeria says as she climbs back into the car next to him, her long limbs splaying as she abandons her earlier poise. 

“I wholly agree with that sentiment, if not its phrasing.”

“You know what I think?” she announces over the thump of the driver closing the door. “I think it’s part of a weapon.”

“It has crossed my mind that that’s what they want us to think – or, more specifically, what they want Latveria to think.”

“Not everything is about _you_ , Victor.”

“I disagree – especially where your nation’s pitiful idea of a threat is concerned.” 

As they turn onto Park Avenue their progress is arrested, the blaring of taxi horns demonstrating that the hold-up is a widespread phenomenon. Valeria takes out her phone and switches it back on to search for information on the source of the disturbance. “Some newbie villain called ‘The Retronaut’,” she says. “Army of vintage-style killbots.”

Victor glances down at the video footage playing above the scrolling banner of newsfeed and makes a tisking sound of disgust. “Crudely constructed and barely ambulatory.”

“Yeah, Spider-Man’s on it, but they’re estimating a twenty minute delay on downtown traffic.” Just as Valeria lowers the device it pings several times in quick succession to announce incoming messages. She taps and swipes in the minutely deft motions that seem second-nature to all those of her generation and then lets out a gasp. “Oh my God. We’re on TMZ.”

“What?”

“It’s a celebrity gossip site.” A few more taps and she brings up a slide-show of slightly blurred photos that must come from the long-lens of a paparazzo. They show Victor and Valeria exiting the limousine as they arrived at the function, Victor handing her up as she sets one foot on the carpet laid out over the pavement, her pause with her hand splayed out over his chest and his hand on the small of her back. Her smile is somehow more intimate, more dazzling in the photograph.

“EXCLUSIVE,” boasts the legend. “ _Beauty and the Beast? Bright Young Thing Valeria Richards Linked to Doctor Doom!_ ”

Valeria laughs as she begins to scroll through the article. “A friend of the young Future Foundation star confided ‘we’ve all been worried about Val for a while – she’s been spending a lot of time in Latveria, her work is suffering. Doom seems to have this hold over her, I don’t know if it’s his magic, or what – they’ve been talking about marriage–’”

“Which of your friends is spouting this claptrap?”

“Victor, ‘a friend of the star’ is code for ‘some bullshit we just made up’.”

“Then we will sue them into non-existence,” Victor announces. “They will rue the day they dared slander Doom!” 

“What for? Saying that we’re an item?”

“For... groundless speculation and the disgusting implication that I am manipulating you with magic.”

“Ah, but haven’t you bamboozled me with your charms and raw animal magnetism?”

“I’m glad you find all this amusing, Valeria. I highly doubt your family and friends will.”

“Well, since they know all about it now I guess it saves on explanations later. What do you think about May weddings – too cliché?”

“Oh, you are ready to ascend the throne as Latveria’s queen?”

“Very funny. Are you ready to have Mister Fantastic as your father-in-law?” She begins typing something on her phone.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m on Twitter, defusing this situation before it gets way out of hand. See?” She shows him the feed.

> **Valeria Richards @ValeriaRichards**  
>  Victor has released me from the grip of his eldritch enchantments long enough to tell you that we are just good friends. #TMZ #sciencebuds  
> 

“It hardly seems sufficient. Why not threaten them? Hack their systems and–” 

“Easy there, Anonymous. Rule number one of the internet is don’t feed the trolls. This is the best response, trust me.” She holds out the device and presses the power button. “Turning it off now – bye bye intrusive media.” 

“Ignoring it does not mean it disappears.”

“No,” she agrees. “But it’s not like – I mean, we’re not doing anything, except looking at each other; it’s hardly incriminating. And so what if we were – I’m an adult, you’re in New York on non-villainous business – sort of.” A lock of her fine, fair hair has fallen from its pinnings and lies in a spiral curl against her cheek, she brushes it back behind her ear and tugs the lobe self-consciously. “It’s strange, isn’t it – all this speculation and we’ve never even touched. It’s like a Victorian courtship – well, apart from the mutual masturbation over webcam.”

Victor removes one gauntlet and holds out his right hand, palm upturned. Valeria’s eyebrows twitch in surprise and she hesitates for a moment before tentatively placing her own hand on top. Her long fingers squeeze his and she gasps.

“You’re warm!”

“What were you expecting?”

“Honestly? I was half-expecting a Doombot.” She takes his hand between both of her own, swirling her fingertips in his palm and tracing the gaps between his fingers. His skin has not seen the light of day in countless years, but it is still darker than hers, but covered with tiny flecks of scar tissue where hot embers have singed him during all the hours of metalwork.

He raises the bare hand to her face and touches her, fingertips gentle at her jawline and his thumb brushing across the swell of her cheek. His thumbnail follows the line of her cupid’s bow, then trails down to press against the soft, pliable flesh of her bottom lip. Her dark blue eyes meet his and he feels the point of her tongue against the pad of his thumb. Her lips part and he pushes deeper, feeling the sharpness of the crowns of her teeth as she catches his digit between them.

“What do I taste like?” he asks, pulling back and rubbing the wetness against her bottom lip. 

“Salt. Metal.” She catches his hand again and pulls it down to splay across her chest. “Touch me, Victor.”

His eyes flare. “All but in public?” 

“Come on, the windows are oh-so-illegally blacked out. Not even the driver can see us.”

“Would it give you pause if he could?” 

“Probably not,” she leans into his touch and gasps as his hand slips down to her neck, index finger dipping into the hollow of her clavicle before his hand comes to rest around the base of her throat. He squeezes her there for a moment, almost speculatively. She gasps and has the sound cut off.

“Huh,” she says, when the grip releases. “I did not know I was into that.”

“I imagine you bruise very easily,” he says, a light, airy tone as his thumb presses against her jugular notch. 

“Like a peach,” she agrees, leaning in to him. 

“Hmm,” he strokes the flat expanse of her sternum with a feather-light touch and she shudders and lets her eyes fall closed. 

“Victor...”

His hand slips beneath the fabric of her dress to caress the swell of her left breast. Her nipple hardens under the press of his still-wet thumb. A rumble of desire comes unbidden to the back of his throat – Victor has not touched a woman in longer than he cares to think about; in fact, the closest he comes to any regular human contact is in his examination of waxy, gelid cadavers. He has all but forgotten how warm and yielding living flesh is, or what it is to touch with the thought of giving pleasure, not merely to evaluate or anatomize. 

“Wait a sec,” she says and she scoots back on the leather seat and hikes up her dress (which will no doubt be hopelessly crumpled before they are finished). Some gymnastic contortions and she pulls a black lace thong from beneath her bunched hem and tosses it negligently to the floor. Impatient, Victor slides the fingers of his bare hand under her knee and tugs her towards him with a jerk; off-balance, she falls backwards with a bitten-back yelp, bracing her arms against the headrest and the walnut panelling of the door.

Victor turns to loom over her and runs his hand up the inside of her thigh. The blood is closer to the surface there and she feels startlingly hot to the touch; the skin is silky and her muscles tremble. His still-gloved hand goes to the small of her back and she jerks at the coldness against her bare skin.

“Oh God, touch me. Please, I can’t–”

He traces the smooth expanses either side of her aggressively-groomed pubic hair and watches her face as she gasps and trembles. Victor has never set much store by seduction – sexual power is a poor substitute for real power, he thinks – but he cannot deny it is gratifying to hear her plead distractedly, to see the evidence of her excitement. He parts her labia delicately with his fingertips and feels the slickness. He can smell her – that animal, saline scent that makes him want to take off his mask and bury his face between her thighs (and he will, _soon_ ). 

He brushes the pad of his thumb through the wetness and rubs her clitoris in a slow, circular motion – an infuriatingly light touch that makes her tilt her hips up for firmer contact. He angles his middle finger and pushes it into her, helplessly fascinated by the sight of it, and of Valeria’s face going slack with pleasure. He pulls out and pushes in with two fingers, feeling more resistance this time – Valeria groans and makes an incoherent pleading sound. 

Without warning, the car starts to move again and pushes his fingers deeper, the vibrations of the engine, carrying through his thumb. She jerks in his lap and he feels the rhythmic clench and release of her orgasm around his fingers. Her back arches at an extreme angle and after seeming to forget how to breathe for a long moment it all comes out in a shuddering rush.

“Are you alright?” he asks as he slowly pulls out.

“Jesus, I’m... um,” She tries to regain a sitting position but fails. “Help, I’m stuck.” 

Victor gathers her in against him and she gives a sort of shaky laugh. “Thank-you. That was...” the superlative she is searching for apparently escapes her; she lets her head drop onto his shoulder.

“Are you always so... precipitous?” he asks, telling himself it is mainly scientific curiosity. It intrigues him that women are so various in their desires – for men the mechanics are fairly straightforward and repetitive; not so the fairer sex. 

“No, not usually.” Perspiration stands out on the curve of her upper lip and her face and neck are glowing. She takes his hand between both of her own and raises it, taking his two middle fingers into her mouth. 

“Obscene,” he says, almost admiringly as he feels the tip of her tongue swirling around the tip of his index finger. She sucks suggestively for a long moment before pulling back so the fingers slip from her lips with a pop. 

“Can I do something for you?” she asks, darting a meaningful look at his lap.

“Not here and not now, Valeria. Have patience.”

“You are so square. Why become a supervillain at all if you don’t want to get blowjobs in the back of a limo?”

Victor does not deign to respond to this pithy remark. Instead he takes his mind off throbbing in his loins by turning his mind back to vibranium, and its applications beyond ‘innovation and brightening futures’ – what the US government might do, or try to do; what he might do when he takes it from them. Possibilities spin out in many directions – how to pin them all down, though? Next to him, Valeria yawns and wraps herself in his cloak.

“Some kind of vapor dispersal system,” he mutters. “What do you think?” 

“For what?”

“I thought you were a genius, Valeria. Keep up.”

“Hey, I am heavily under the influence of oxytocin. You have to ask me all the hard questions _before_ orgasm.”

“I will bear that in mind,” he says.

When they reach the Baxter Building, she exits alone and faces a barrage of camera flashes. Before the door closes, Doom extends his hand and the flimsy gadgets all short out, their screens going haywire with random pixels and the memory cards blank. Thousands of dollars worth of lenses suddenly develop spiderweb cracks. That will teach the paparazzi what folly it is to meddle in the affairs of Doctor Doom – at least until he can engineer a more dramatic solution. 

*~*~* 

There is the sound of a kerfuffle as Valeria answers Victor’s call. “Buzz off, Bentley,” he hears over a half-covered microphone.

Then a male voice, something about it oddly familiar: “your defeat has only been delayed, not averted, Richards!”

“Close the door, twerp! Were you born in a hermetically-sealed lab or a barn?”

Valeria’s laughter, a slam, and then the unobscured sound of her voice. “Hello, Victor. Sorry about that.”

“What is going on?”

“Saturday Night Subjugation. It’s like Risk except we made up all the rules and the map is the whole galaxy.” 

“I see. Do you know you left your... well, what I can only describe as scrap of lace masquerading as an undergarment – on the floor of my car?”

“When did you figure that out?”

“When the driver presented them to me.”

“Why did he do that – did he think they were yours?”

“Very amusing.”

“Where are they now?”

“In my bed – as am I, by the way.”

Valeria gives a lascivious chuckle. “That is the hottest thing I’ve ever heard. Are you touching yourself?” 

“Not just now. Soon, I imagine – in the perfect dark, wherein I have leisure to recall the scent and the warmth of your skin.”

“You are an insufferable tease.”

“You are not the one who was denied satisfaction today.”

“Hardly my fault. When can I see you, Victor? Or not ‘see’ you, but you know what I mean.”

“Come to the embassy tomorrow afternoon. I am returning to Latveria in the evening, but I have some hours I could spare you.” 

“I suppose I should be flattered by that,” she laughs. “Goodnight Victor – sweet dreams.”

*~*~*

>   
> **Bentley-23 @BentleyLeAuteur**  
>  @ValeriaRichards Midnight booty calls from a certain someone? Better top what OK! is paying me or your beans are so spilled.
> 
> **Valeria Richards @ValeriaRichards**  
>  @BentleyLeAuteur You can’t blackmail someone in a public forum, dumbass. Besides, OK! are keeping me onside for exclusive access to the wedding photos. #savethedate #notreally 
> 
> **Reed Richards @MisterFantastic**  
>  @ValeriaRichards @BentleyLeAuteur BOTH OF YOU DOWNSTAIRS IN THE LECTURE THEATER NOW.
> 
> **Valeria Richards @ValeriaRichards**  
>  @MisterFantastic DAD, WE DISCUSSED THIS. THIS IS NOT WHAT TWITTER IS FOR.
> 
> **Bentley-23 @BentleyLeAuteur**  
>  @ValeriaRichards @MisterFantastic  
>  WHY ARE WE SHOUTING?


	8. Chapter 8

Valeria arrives at the Latverian consulate the next day and runs the gamut of security gates before being allowed up the steps and into the main building, which is incongruously styled after the round-turreted germanic castles Victor has dotted all over his homeland. 

Victor’s human servants, she has long since learned, come in two varieties: terrified lackey and faithful retainer. The man who conducts her through the main building is the latter: decked out in a sort of livery, the tunic of which is emblazoned with a Latverian eagle (more sinister and sharp-beaked than its American cousin). He has an eye missing and walks with a limp, setting the collection of keys, scissors and other weird sundry objects that dangle from his chatelaine to jangling. “His excellency is not within just at present. He has left instructions for you to wait in his private apartments.”

“Has he indeed?” Valeria arches an eyebrow. 

“There are refreshments and other entertainments.”

She tries not to laugh. ‘Entertainments’ – what does that even mean coming from Doctor Doom – copies of New Scientist? Eighteenth-century gothic novels? Robot porn? A set of floor tiles you have to step on in the correct order to avoid plunging to certain death?

The servant rubs his hands together. “I do hope everything is to madam’s taste. His excellency was not forthcoming on your... specific requirements.”

“Uh,” says Valeria. “And what do you imagine those are?”

“Krull hesitates even to guess, madam, but the private stores are well-stocked and at your disposal. Now, If there are _live_ animals you need...”

“Why would I need animals – why did you have to specify ‘live’?” She stops and he looks up at her, squinting from beneath his heavy brows with the one remaining eye. “Forget it, I suspect the answer is horrifying.”

The servant makes a gesture of anxious supplication. “Please forgive Krull his boundless ignorance – his excellency has given me only enough training in the dark arts to be of assistance in his _simpler_ conjurations–”

“I’m not a witch,” Valeria says. “Or – I don’t know what the politically correct term is – magician? Sorcerer?”

Krull regards her with some astonishment. “Indeed? Then if madam will kindly pause here a moment, there are some things I should have removed and some that will need to be... scoured.”

He limps off at a faster pace, calling out to fellow servants in a tone of alarm in a language that is neither English nor Hungarian. 

Valeria sighs and seats herself on an ornately-carved trunk. She takes out her tablet because she might as well do some work while she is waiting. Victor’s wifi password is, predictably, ‘DOOM’.”

*~*~*

When Victor returns Valeria is lying on his bed wearing only her heels and jewelry. She looks up as his form blocks the light coming from the library-anteroom beyond and shuts off the three-dimensional projection of a particle collider she was working on, laying her tablet aside. Victor’s cloak is noticeably charred and tattered around the bottom and his chest plate is dented.

“I’m not even going to ask,” she says, raising an eyebrow. “‘Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t watch the evening news’ is now my official policy.”

Victor ignores her remark, looking back over his own shoulder. “Why are their traces of blood and rock salt everywhere?”

“Hmm? Oh, apparently there was a misunderstanding. Your servants thought we were preparing for some unholy ritual.”

“Well,” he runs his gaze down her body, “it seems they were not entirely misinformed.” He approaches the bed and reaches down, grasping her shoe by its stiletto heel to tug it off none too gently before doing the same to the other. 

“So, I know this is kind of a cliché,” she says, raising herself on her elbows and letting her thighs fall apart, “but it seems like one of us is overdressed for this party.” She lifts one bare foot and he catches it in his gloved hand. “How are you even planning to do this? Do I have to wear a blindfold? Does your armor have some really interesting attachments I don’t know about?”

“All things will become apparent in the fullness of time,” he says, imperturbably. She groans and slumps back onto the mattress in frustration. Victor releases her foot and steps away from the bed to press a button on the wall she had assumed was a light switch. There is a whirring and then a series of ominous mechanical clanks; the room dims rapidly as a set of external shutters snap closed. Finally the darkness is absolute: Valeria rubs her eyes and waits but she can see nothing but the starbursts of her ocular nerves firing.

“Stay there. I will return.” His footfalls fade off in the direction of another anteroom she has not explored, the sound of a door opening reaches her ears. She wonders, briefly, how he sees in the dark – his mask has a night vision display, most likely – but it could be a magical ability, or simply that he has memorized the layout of the apartment in minute detail. 

“O-kay then,” she says to the empty room. Her throat constricts and she sounds nervous – she _is_ nervous, which makes no sense because it’s Victor, and she wants this so badly – has wanted it in some abstract way for much longer than it would really be healthy to admit. Perhaps it is because the whole scenario has a faint whiff of absurdity, which is only to be expected of Doom – everything he does is overly histrionic and grandiose, after all, why should his performance of sex be any different?

After a period of time which probably feels much longer than it really is, her ears catch the quiet sound of bare feet moving across the stone floor. 

“Victor?”

“Were you expecting someone else?” It is unmistakably his voice – though clearer than usual without the buzzing, metallic distortion it has when resonating against the mask.

She laughs. “I don’t know, maybe. It’s like something out of a centuries-old farce – making love in the dark so the heroes can switch places.” 

“A bed trick?” the mattress dips and she shivers, caught between desire and trepidation. “You think making love to you is such an onerous task I would employ a proxy?”

“You’re a very complicated and eccentric man, Victor. Also, creepily good at robotics and manufacturing synthetic skin.”

“I give you my word that this is my own proper body.”

“Yeah? Can I touch you?” even as she asks she is sitting up and reaching out to him. She feels warm skin, but can’t work out what body part it might belong to, and in a split-second she feels Victor’s hands closing around her wrists. He pushes her back until she falls against the mattress, then he threads his fingers through hers and leans on her hands, pinning her. His knees are planted either side of her legs, pressing them together. 

“I want to keep you like this,” he says. “Are you comfortable?”

Valeria blinks against the blackness. She hopes he can’t see her or how stupid her expression must look at this moment. “Um? I guess. I mean, you don’t have to pin me down. I’m not going anywhere.” Even though they are not touching except at the hands and knees, she can feel his body heat radiating against her skin. It turns out that sensory deprivation is another turn-on she never knew she had. 

She wonders why he wants it this way. Is it a power trip for him, or does he just not trust her not to touch his scars? She can hardly blame him – she wants more than anything to rub her cheek against his and feel their texture. She thinks of all the medical textbooks she pored through looking at different kinds of scar tissue – hypertrophic, keloid, atrophic – medical curiosity, she told herself, rather than an indulgence of her morbidly Victor-centric kinks. 

“Valeria,” he says, a quiet murmur, and she can feel the exhalation against her cheek. She tilts her head up, wanting, searching for his mouth, only to be unexpectedly granted it, the rough brush of his lips against hers. Victor kisses like an actor from the silver screen, pressing against her with almost bruising force. She can barely move or breathe and it is wonderful. He gives a sigh of pleasure against her mouth that makes her shift and wriggle underneath him, then he begins to kiss her jaw and the column of her neck. 

When his mouth opens over her right breast, teeth grazing her nipple, she makes a startled, pathetic sound she has never heard herself make before, and if her legs were not still pinned, she would have kicked out reflexively. He then lavishes attention on the other breast, leaving her nipples peaked with sensitivity and cold from cooling saliva, before moving downwards again, mouthing kisses against the convex swell of her abdomen. His downwards journey frees her legs, but he keeps up the pressure of on her hands, pulling them down by her waist.

“Victor,” she gasps, “ _wait_.” As he freezes, Valeria swallows and blinks against the darkness again. _This is so awkward_ , she thinks. “I should probably have mentioned this earlier, but do we need not to have a conversation about, you know... protection?”

“I take it you don’t mean security systems or magical wards?” his voice vibrates against her stomach, and she wishes the sensation was just a few inches lower. 

“No, I mean... prophylaxis.” Valeria gives herself a round of slow applause in her own head, because that is officially the least sexy way she could have broached that subject. 

“Doom is immune to all human diseases. An additional benefit of some magicks–”

“Please don’t talk about yourself in the third person in bed, Victor. Seriously, I’m drawing a line.” She tries to make a gesture, but can only push uselessly against his palm. Her hand is embarrassingly clammy.

He makes a sound of impatience. “Do you have any further delays or objections, or can I continue?”

Valeria squirms helplessly against the bedclothes. “Oh, please continue.”

As he settles between her legs, Valeria tries to process the many and conflicting stimuli – the cold air of the room and the heat of the male body on top of her, the too much sensation and the critical lack. Suddenly Victor has his naked mouth on her vulva, licking a long stripe upwards and over her clitoris. Where her thighs tremble against his face she can feel the faintest hint of the texture of his scars. She is going to come with ridiculous swiftness again and she cannot seem to stop making a repetitive, plaintive cry. 

What is wrong with her? It is not like she hasn’t fantasized about this, particularly, but she never really thought the real Victor would do it – there is something just so raw and uncontrolled about him fucking her with his mouth. He slips his tongue into her and the muscle is so wet and flexible she clenches and shudders.

He licks her swollen clitoris again, sucks and she makes a yelping sound bringing her knees against his chest to push him back. “Too much! I’m going to–”

“Yes,” he says, sounding somewhere between amused and annoyed. “That was the general idea.”

“I don’t have all that short a refractory period, so...”

“No?” he pauses and she can almost hear him recalculating. “Interesting.”

He moves, leaning over her again and pulling her arms above her head so he can hold her down with just one hand. He kisses her again and she can taste herself on his mouth, she moans quietly and sucks his top lip, the point of her tongue finding out the raised, uneven surface of his scars. 

He is touching himself – she can feel the movement of his arm muscles against her inner thigh, hear the rasp of his breath. 

She turns her head aside. “Victor, let me–” He squeezes her crossed wrists as if to remind her he intends her to remain exactly where she is. She tilts her hips up and groans as she feels the brush of his knuckles against her most sensitive parts. He grunts and rubs the head of his cock against her clitoris.

“Oh, you’re big aren’t you?” she whispers harshly. “I knew you would be. Please Victor, don’t tease me, let me feel it–”

He brings his hand up to cover her mouth and then lets it slide down to rest heavily on her throat. “Do you imagine these pornographic ramblings please me, Valeria?”

“Uh?” She swallows with difficulty. “Yeah? I mean most men like it when you tell them how big their dicks are.”

“I am not most men. I do not require a string of breathless profanities to assure me of your enjoyment, or my power.” He shifts his hips and she feels the relentless pressure of him pressing in. She has never done this without a condom before, and the heat and intimacy surprises her. 

The weight of his body is as crushing as she thought it would be, and she clenches his waist with her knees and finally lets go – there is no three-dimensional array of machines and plans and possibility: she is in one place, and in one moment. She closes her eyes and imagines the intensity of Victor’s stare, how he always looks at her as if he sees something different than everyone else does. When he kisses her again and begins to move, finally, she doesn’t think anything. 

*~*~*

When Valeria comes back to herself Victor is lying somewhere nearby, breathing heavily. Everything south of her navel tingles and pulses and when she presses her thighs together there is a bright spark of sensation somewhere between an aftershock of orgasm and a twinge of pain. She rolls onto her side gingerly and throws out an arm to find Victor, causing him to give a grunt of indignation when she makes contact. He takes her wayward hand and lays it flat on his chest.

“So, um,” she says hoarsely. “I don’t know what your generation says after sex. Thanks?”

“It was my pleasure.” He sounds too tired to even mean it as a witty retort.

Valeria rubs a circle on his chest, trails down his abdomen and makes a drowsy, intrigued sound. “You are very hairy, aren’t you?” 

“What were you expecting?”

“I thought you’d be more... streamlined. I don’t know. I like it, though – it’s retro.”

Victor sighs in a put-upon fashion as she hugs him tightly and lays her head on his shoulder. “Valeria, must you?”

“Yes. Oxytocin. Intense feelings of euphoria and bonding. Just lie there quietly enjoy the sensations of heightened power and virility with your testosterone rush, Victor.” 

“You have a very hormone-centric view of human behaviour. I for one resent the implication that we are at the whim of our glands.”

“Yeah, well, chemicals are traceable, measurable. Everything else is just psychology or anthropology and you know how I feel about social sciences.” 

Victor makes a sound of amusement at that and puts his arm around her, stroking his fingers through the damp strands of hair at the base of her neck.

“Mmm,” she says muzzily, “can I touch your face next time?”

“Go to sleep, you infuriating woman.”

“Mff,” she says, perversely enjoying the feeling of her cheek sticking to the skin of his left pectoral and the scent of male sweat. It should be unnerving, she thinks, Victor von Doom out of his armor and humanized, vulnerable, like a snail pried from its shell; instead it just feels thrilling and taboo. She falls asleep smiling, with Victor’s fingertips rubbing a circle on the small of her back.

*~*~*

When she wakes the bed is empty and the shutters are open, the weak light of dawn filtering into the room. She hears the sound of helicopters circling somewhere nearby and from the library beyond the sound of clanking. She wraps a bed sheet around herself loosely and ventures out, rubbing her eyes.

“Victor, what’s going on–agh!” It is not Victor. It is the one-eyed housekeeper and man-of-all-work. She almost drops the sheet and then fumbles to secure it around herself more effectively. 

“Good morning, madame,” Krull says, pausing in his laying out of covered dishes to bow in an obsequious manner. “I trust you slept well?”

“Where is Victor?”

“The master has gone back to the motherland.” Krull gives her a look that she could almost swear was faintly amused. “Did he not mention that such was his intention?”

“Yeah, I guess he did,” she sighs and scrubs a hand over her face. “What is going on outside?”

“Ah, it seems your government is laboring under the misconception that his excellency has taken something that is rightfully theirs.”

“Right,” says Valeria. “So am I in immediate danger of being arrested in a raid?”

“Oh no, madame. The ambassador is in conference with the leaders of some of your security services now. I’m sure harmony will soon be restored.”

“Yeah, right. Well, I guess at least it’s only S.H.I.E.L.D. waiting out there and not the paparazzi.”

Krull makes a noise of disagreement. “Regrettably, madame...”

“Oh, you have got to be kidding me!” Valeria strides to a window and looks down at the gates, where, sure enough, a sodden group of photographers are camped out beneath windbreakers and umbrellas. She finds her phone where she abandoned it on the library table and there are twenty-two missed calls. “This is ridiculous. I don’t care what dad says about power expenditure and causality, I’m teleporting everywhere from now on.”

Krull makes a sound of polite agreement. “Would madame care for breakfast?” he lifts the lid off a pewter dish.

“What is that?”

“Blood sausage.”

“You know, somehow, Krull, I’m really not in the mood.”

“No?” he peeks under a few more lids. “Stuffed cabbage? Grilled dormouse? Rye bread and beef dripping?”

Valeria raises her eyebrow. “No thanks. I think I’ll just skip breakfast if it’s all the same to you.”

Krull looks very grave at this. “Alas, I have failed! And his excellency was adamant that that whatever delicacies madame cares for, they should be produced – no matter the difficulty or cost!”

She holds her hand up. “No, honestly, please don’t – I’m just going to get dressed and do my walk of shame.”

Krull lays his hand over his eye socket. “But madam, when the master says do a thing, I _must_ do it.”

Valeria sighs and bites the corner off a relatively harmless looking piece of bread, then gives Krull a thumbs up. “Tell the master his hospitality is second to none.”

*~*~*

By the time she schleps the thirty or so blocks back to the Baxter Building, it is ten AM and she is footsore and starving enough to mildly regret turning down that bizarre Latverian breakfast special. She slips past the rooms the kids are studying in (or should be) and heads to the kitchen, throwing open the massive refrigerator to rummage through and pull out all the cold cuts and condiments she can find. As she balances on one foot to toe the door closed she yelps and takes a step back, as her brother has apparently been standing there behind it for some time.

“Jesus, Franklin!” she drops a jar of mustard and he arrests its fall mid-air. 

He crosses his arms over his chest. “You’re in so much trouble.”

“Why, are mom and dad going to ground me? In case you haven’t noticed, we’re not kids anymore, goody two-shoes.” She deposits her spoils on the breakfast bar and moves to to grab a mug down from a shelf, pouring herself a cup of coffee from the fresh batch she put on.

“Yeah, real mature. Run off with a supervillain to get back at daddy.”

“I’m not running off with Victor... and it as nothing to do with dad.”

“He’s a murderer and a tyrant – how do you even function with so much cognitive dissonance, Val?”

Valeria takes a sip of her coffee, then thinks some very vivid thoughts about the previous night. Franklin makes a choking sound and the mustard jar crashes onto the floor. “Clumsy, bro,” she says, stepping over the mess to sit up at the table. “You need to work on your psychic blocks again.”

Franklin gives her a hurt, angry look and leaves the room, almost bumping into Bentley, who has chosen this moment to stick the lens of his hand-held camera around the door. 

“Valeria Richards,” he says in his best not-very-good David Attenborough impression, “diva of applied physics, seen here in the midst of a veritable feeding-frenzy–”

“Turn that off. What are you doing here anyway, don’t you have young minds to warp?”

“Sent them on a scavenger hunt on Xeron. Should keep them busy for a while, especially since one of the items on the list is crinita fungus.”

“Isn’t that only found in comets in the Denebola system?”

“Exactly.”

Valeria grins at him and makes a gesture of invitation with her butter knife. “Sandwich?”

“Ah Val, you know the way to a guy’s heart.” He hops up onto the stool next to hers and sets down his camera, folding closed the viewfinder.

“What are you working on?” she nods towards the device as she starts spreading mayonnaise on multiple slices of bread.

“Highly secret, highly experimental.”

“In black and white with you doing a moody voice-over?”

“Nah, black and white is all in the lighting, I don’t have the budget. These days I’m all about candid.” He drums his fingers on the countertop. “So, what’s up with you and Franklin?”

“Why, what did he say?”

“Nothing, but he has that haunted look he gets.”

“What haunted look?”

“Your family drama gives him a psychic ulcer, you know that right?”

“Franklin is weird,” Valeria says, opening a packet of cheese slices. “He has literally godlike powers, but he never really seems to _do_ anything, you know what I mean? How is he _still_ such a wimpy crybaby? I don’t get it.” 

“Don’t you?” Bentley does that avid expression which always makes her feel faintly uncomfortable. “I guess that makes sense.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asks, tessellating cheese.

“Val, you’re not a people-person. You’re just... not.” 

“Hey! At least I’m not a creepy voyeur.”

Bentley grins. “See?”

“And you just sent a bunch of preteens off to a distant planet for the day to avoid teaching them anything...”

“First off, Dragon Man is with them. Second, though I am a truly excellent leader, motivator, and general sculptor of young minds, the most important thing I can teach those kids is _learner autonomy_. If they’d looked up the things on the list _before_ jumping in the spaceship, they wouldn’t be having these problems. Life lesson, courtesy of Bentley-23 Wittman.”

Valeria gives a snort of amusement, then rips open the packet of bologna, now thinking of the sandwiches as a series of venn diagrams. “You really think I’m horrible to Franklin?”

“You’re not horrible, exactly. But you don’t get him – you can’t imagine what it’s like to be the way he is, living every moment in fear of what he _could_ do. I figure that’s his gift to the universe – not bugging out and killing us all.”

“Huh,” she looks up and blinks a few times. “I never thought of it that way before.” 

“So,” Bentley says, finally making himself useful by beginning to slice up a tomato. “You and Doom.”

“The king and I,” she agrees, chomping philosophically on a pickle. 

“What’s he like... you know...” Bentley waggles his eyebrows and shows the gap between his front teeth.

“In bed? Surprisingly strait-laced, at least so far. Pretty good, though. You’re not recording this, are you? If this ends up on Youtube he will nuke New York.” 

“Did he let you see him naked – like, totally naked?” Bentley does a dynamic framing gesture around his face strongly reminiscent of Madonna’s ‘Vogue’ video.

Valeria grins and shakes her head. “It was dark. I felt his scars a little bit though – they’re just on his face. The rest of him is normal – or above normal. Optimum.”

“Whenever you want someone to write your memoirs, Val...”

“Not while Victor’s still alive. Which is _forever_ , apparently.” She puts the top layer of bread on their sandwiches and watches Bentley slice them into triangles. “This is ridiculous, isn’t it? I mean, I’ve always spent time with Victor – I don’t get why it’s suddenly a big deal. Frank’s acting like I’m an accessory to war crimes.”

“I think it’s the publicity. Your dad thinks you shacking up with a supervillain is bad for the brand, therefore bad for the budget.”

“Screw what dad thinks – I won more research grants this year than he has in the last three put together. Where is he, anyway?”

“Consulting for the Avengers, I think.” Through a mouthful of sandwich, he adds: “one of their bi-weekly cosmic catastrophes. I wasn’t really listening.”

Val tears the crust off her own sandwich contemplatively. “How do you feel about taking down the internet media, Bentley?”

Bentley grins. “Val, I thought you would never ask.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had lots of important things to say about this chapter, but all you really need to know is that Bentley + sandwich is the OTP.


	9. Chapter 9

Valeria is crouching beneath the front section of the Model IV Fantasticar as it sits raised on a hydraulic lift in the Baxter Building’s hangar bay when she hears a shrill, tinny version of The Imperial March from Star Wars. Belatedly, she remembers that it’s the ring tone she assigned to Victor. She turns off the gas supply to the welding torch and pushes her goggles up her head, then tries to shimmy her phone out of her pocket in the confined space.

“Hey Vic,” she puts the phone on loudspeaker and balances it on her toolbox as she spots a loose wire that requires her attention.

A weary sigh. “Don’t call me that.”

“Would you prefer I go back to Uncle Doom?”

“Don’t be perverse.”

“So what’s up? Are you still in Latveria?”

“I am. Did you get the flowers?”

“Yes! That was very sweet of you. I didn’t bother with the ceremony though, in the end I just graduated _in absentia_.”

“They gave you an _egregia cum laude_ and you didn’t think it worth showing up?”

“Eh. Mom, dad, Ben and Uncle Johnny were off-planet. Frank’s not talking to me. Didn’t seem worth it. Besides, it’s only a roll of paper and a stupid hat – I’m busy.”

“Ceremonies are important, Valeria. You should not deny yourself a rite of passage.”

“Wait, did you – did you want me to invite _you_?”

There is a short pause on the other end of the line. “That would be unwise given the public speculation–”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m working on that. Seriously though, did you want to come to my graduation and be all proud uncle-stroke-lover-stroke-Svengali?”

“Of course not,” Victor says, but the strain in his voice suggests otherwise. “Doom has more important things to do than visit inferior American universities.”

“Of course you do,” she says placatingly. “How is the motherland?”

“An idyll of peace and prosperity, as ever. I am preparing for Children’s Day.”

“What happens then?”

“Doom favours his tiny citizens with gifts of toys and his kingly presence.”

“Cool.” It is a mark of how accustomed to Victor’s eccentricities Valeria has become that she doesn’t find anything about this holiday strange. “Can I come visit? I’m good with kids – I even used to be one. Plus, I miss you.” After a beat she adds, reflectively: “I probably should have opened with that.” Damn, Bentley is right – she is not a people-person.

“Valeria, I hope you know that you are always welcome in Latveria.” 

“Yeah. It’s still nice to be asked, though.”

“Then consider this a formal invitation.”

She grins and pulls off her goggles. “Well ok then. Don’t start without me.”

*~*~*

She runs straight from the car up the castle steps and throws herself against Victor – a simple, overwhelming joy that turns to slight awkwardness when he hesitates in closing his arms around her.

He then leads her into the dining room and takes his place at the head of the table, drinking while she eats. 

“Have you thought about postgraduate qualifications?”

“Are you going to pitch Doomstadt-U to me again?”

He tilts his head. “Certainly you would have all the resources could wish for if you chose to pursue your studies here.”

“And you’d be my advisor?”

“Who else is qualified?”

She smiles and rests her chin on her palm, pushing her food around on her plate idly with the fork held in the other hand. “I’m not sure academia is for me. People are getting to know who I am and what I can do – I don’t think I need a doctorate.”

Victor makes a noise of disagreement.

“Where did you graduate from, _Herr Doktor_?” When his eyes narrow at the question, Valeria covers her mouth with her hand to stifle a yelp of laughter. “Oh God. It was Doomstadt, wasn’t it? You built an entire university just to award yourself a PhD.”

Victor glares at her but does not deny it. Instead, with an air of wounded dignity he leans forward and pours himself another glass of wine.

“Just out of curiosity, what did you write your thesis on? Can I check it out of the library?”

“Valeria, you have only been here half an hour and you are already trying my patience.”

“I’m sorry, Victor. It’s just... it’s a little funny, you have to admit.”

“I admit no such thing. You do not understand, Valeria, because you are blind to your own privilege. You are brilliant, yes, but it is by no means insignificant that you were also raised wealthy and American, the scion of a famous dynasty – people line up to give _you_ awards and opportunities. No-one has ever _given_ Victor von Doom anything. All that I have, I have created or taken. Everything you may see by looking around you are the fruits of my indomitable will.”

“But why a PhD, Victor? If you can just take things, and make things, why did you think it was important people call you ‘doctor’?”

“It sounds well with ‘Doom’, does it not?” He sips his wine. “Besides, it was no less than my research warranted. Had there not been that unpleasantness at my college in the states...”

Valeria smiles to herself, because really, only Victor von Doom could refer to a exploding hell portal as an ‘unpleasantness’.

“Which reminds me, how is your father?”

“Yeah,” she says, spearing a piece of rare steak, “good.”

“‘Good’? Is he not still clutching his figurative pearls over our continued association?”

“‘Association’, huh? Is that what you old guys are calling it these days?” She reaches for her own drink. “He’s over it. Dad’s actually not very good at holding a thought in his head for more than five minutes, at least not about _people_ , as opposed to sub-atomic particles. It’s both the most annoying thing about him and his saving grace – he’s literally incapable of holding a grudge.”

“Hmm,” Victor says, drumming his fingers on the table. “That is aggravating.”

“He might remember again in about five years’ time, if that makes you feel any better. Also, my mom keeps sending me on these major guilt trips about falling out with Franklin. She does this thing where she puts her hands on my shoulders and frowns at me. ‘Valeria, honey, you know you can always talk to me...’. I think she wants to bond with me over infatuations with older men. Barf. So much barf.”

“Charming.”

“Yup.” She pushes her plate away and stretches. “So, I’m going to take a bath and go to bed. Where am I sleeping?”

He narrows his eyes at her behind the mask. “What do you mean?”

“Guest room or with you?”

“I do not require rest at present.”

“Doesn’t really answer my question.” She rises from her seat and crosses to stand behind him, her arms resting on his shoulders and linked around his neck. “Victor. Look, you know what the score is here. We’ve... made love, we’re going to do it again, aren’t we?”

“I have considered that it would be wiser if we didn’t. Perhaps we ought to be merely... friends, once more.”

“We’ve been a lot of things, Victor, but were never merely friends.” Valeria leans down and kisses his cheek – or rather the contoured surface of the mask that covers where his cheek should be.

He does not say anything as she walks from the room and it is briefly enough to make her think she has miscalculated. However, she has not been luxuriating in the giant bed she finds within the depths of his supervillain man-cave for more than twenty minutes – her hair still damp and skin scented with bath oil – before Victor is climbing over her and biting her neck, muttering harshly about how she intoxicates him.

His mouth tastes like wine, but she resists making a quip about intoxication and rolls over on top of him. He won’t stop rubbing her clitoris with his thumb when she’s riding him, even when she grasps his wrist in warning – so it is really his fault when she orgasms too soon again. 

Still, If there’s one thing she knows her generation excels at, it is throwing themselves into oral sex with loveless abandon. She feels his abdominal muscles tense and his thighs quiver as she takes him deep in her throat, his hand twisting in her hair as he urges her on. The prevailing cultural narrative, she understands, is that she should consider the act submissive – degrading, even – so perhaps she really is wired wrongly, because she feels absurdly powerful when she makes him come, humming around him as she swallows and listening with satisfaction to his gasps and ragged breathing. She wonders how long it has been since someone has done that for him – perhaps no-one ever has, she thinks, deciding that she enjoys that idea so much that she doesn’t care whether or not it is actually true. 

When Valeria moves back up the bed to lie next to Victor he kisses her forehead, the bridge of her nose and the corner of her mouth. She strokes the back of his neck and he does not attempt to stop her when her hands slide higher, following the curve of his skull. He has hair, which surprises her for some reason. She wonders what colour it is: dark like in the picture she saw, or threaded with silver? Before she can push her luck any further with physical intimacies, or questions spoken out loud, she falls asleep. 

When she wakes again in the room’s absolute dark, she puts her arm out beneath the tangle of sheets and encounters only the faintest hint of residual body heat. 

*~*~*

Children’s Day begins with Doom’s yearly visit to the Doomstadt orphanage.

“Not very PC to call it an orphanage,” Valeria observes. “Children’s home?”

Victor gives a grunt of displeasure. “What does it matter? It is not the name of the facility but the care received therein that should concern us.”

They enter the courtyard on horseback to find the children standing in a semicircle on the steps of the grey-stone building, where ivy winds around the colonnades and a frieze above the doorway shows Doom enclosed in a sun. They wear neat little uniforms of serge in shades of grey, blue and green, their faces are pinkly clean and their eyes bright with excitement. They are attended by women in white lace-trimmed caps and starched smocks over heavy dark gowns. The adults all have that stoic watchfulness Valeria has always noted about Latverians – whether it is an effect of Victor’s rule, or a preexisting national trait, she cannot say. 

Victor and Valeria dismount and the robot servants in attendance take their horses’ reins. As they come forward the children begin to sing, a sweet but slightly halting folk song. When they finish, a little girl of about five years old comes forward and presents Victor with a bunch of wildflowers. He goes down on one knee to receive them and pulls the child into the crook of his arm before he stands up again. The little girl smiles shyly and twists her hands in the fabric of his cloak, saying something that makes him tilt his head and respond in a low murmur. A servant takes the flowers and they proceed on their tour of the building, the children running ahead and proudly showing off their modest possessions. Valeria feels a tug on her fingers and she looks down to find that a small boy with dark, serious eyes has grabbed hold of her hand. 

“Hello,” she says, in her halting Hungarian. “I am Valeria. What are you called?””

“I am Marek,” the little boy says. “You talk funny.”

“American,” she says.

“Ah,” he gives her a pitying look. 

“You like it here?”

“Yes,” he says. “I was born in Symkaria, but it was a bad place.”

Valeria almost asks him what happened to his family, but doubts her powers of speech to sensitively do so. “Do they happily treat you here?”

He nods curtly. “The mothers are good.” 

“What do you think of Doctor Doom?”

“The baron is powerful,” Marek replies. She cannot tell if it is admiring, fearful or simply a childish declaration of fact. “Are you a queen?”

Valeria laughs. “No, I am... regular. The baron friend is mine. A very long time.”

The children lead them on a tour of their classrooms at the orphanage, which Valeria notes have plenty of handicrafts on display, but no writing exercises. There are also no blackboards, whiteboards or even alphabet friezes; certainly, nothing remotely resembling technology – unless she counts the abacus. 

This little performance over, they return outside and walk the short journey to the Cynthia von Doom Memorial Gardens, where more of the doombots are waiting with food and gifts laid out on trestle tables. Victor watches with seemingly rapt attention as the children unwrap their presents in delight – they are all quaint and old-fashioned objects, much like Santa Claus and his elves are commonly imagined to make in their workshop instead of the smartphones and game consoles that western children actually put on their Christmas lists.

Valeria withdraws from the crowd to seat herself on a bench and observe as the children eat and play, sternly corralled by their black-clothed guardians when their celebrations threaten to become to boisterous. Before long Victor joins her, the bench creaking under the combined weight of his body and its casing of armor. He has a sort of regal sprawl that makes everything he sits on seem like it should be a throne.

Valeria shades her eyes with her hands as she looks over at the children playing with their new acquisitions in the dappled sunlight of the garden. There is no denying that it is an idyllic scene. “Those outfits the women wear – are they nuns? I don’t think I’ve ever seen habits like those before.”

“No, they are governesses. How should they be votaries when Roman Catholicism is outlawed in Latveria?”

“Is it? Why?”

“Because I consider their stupid devotion to that triple-crowned fool in Rome an act of treason.”

“Of course you do,” Valeria sighs. “But then if that’s how you feel, why allow them any religion at all?”

“It is the opiate of the masses, is that not how your friend ‘Jeff’ would put it? So who am I to deny them their little diversions and the comfort they might take in rationalizing away their hardships?”

“I assume that’s a rhetorical question.”

A little girl runs over to Victor looking grief-stricken. “Master baron!”

“What is the matter, child?” he picks her up and sets her on his knee as she knuckles her eye and her bottom lip wobbles. She takes a great, shuddering breath: “Emil pushed me down. He says I can’t play with his new football because I am a girl. That’s not fair, is it?”

“Not at all,” Victor tuts and brushes the soil from her knees with the hem of his cloak, then he unfolds first one and then the other of her chubby hands to do the same to her palms. “Now, why don’t you go back and tell him that the baron says little boys who don’t share are sent to the salt mines?”

The girl nods gravely and Victor chucks her under the chin. “Dry up those tears. We must never give those who wrong us the satisfaction of seeing our dismay. Is it not so?”

“Yes, baron.”

He lowers her to her feet again. “Good child, off you go.”

Valeria smiles as she watches the girl running off across the lawn with a look of great purpose. “Did you never think of having children of your own, Victor?”

He makes a considering sound. “Clones are limited. If I did allow one to grow to adulthood, autonomously, I imagine it would be nothing but a clumsy threat.”

“No, I meant...” Valeria gestures helplessly, “with a woman?”

“Ah. No – that is to say, I have given the matter some thought, but I never found a woman whom I deemed worthy enough to mix her mettle with mine.”

Valeria bites her lip because she imagines Victor will be angry if she starts to laugh. 

“It matters not,” he continues. “As you see, all Latveria’s children have Doom as their father.”

“So they do,” she agrees. 

“The world calls me a tyrant – but he who would be supreme lord must also accept responsibilities and cares. I cannot stand those countries – those democracies, as they term themselves – that would let a child be in want, or blame the demon _economy_ for their failings. Children are innocent and pure. They are beings of unbounded potential.”

“Until what point?”

“What?”

“When do they stop being innocent, pure and full of potential? Twelve, thirteen?”

“It depends on the child. There are some rare creatures, I believe, that never do. When I find that prodigy – the Latverian child among the many who is as unique as I myself was – perhaps he, or she, will be my heir.”

“Is that who you built all the empty schools and academies for? This putative, magical successor-child?”

“There was a time...” Victor breaks off, seeming uncharacteristically reticent. “Did you ever meet Kristoff?”

“Yeah, just once, when I was a kid. Dad told me about him – how he, well, betrayed you.”

Victor makes a sound of annoyance. “Well may it appear that way to Richards – he was ever a small-minded fool.”

“Didn’t Kristoff try to kill you and take over your country. Like, repeatedly?”

“That is how he attempted to prove his worth as my heir. What else should he do, given that Doom is eternal?” Victor pauses, then makes a sound of consideration. “Well, I loved him as a son. I suppose it is only natural for a father to be disappointed.”

“Wait, are you disappointed that he tried to defeat you, or that he didn’t manage to pull it off?”

“Doom does not tolerate failure.”

Valeria puts a hand over her mouth – not knowing whether to laugh at this or cry on his behalf. “Victor, you know that’s totally fucked up, right?”

“Language, Valeria – there are children present.” After a considering pause he continues, with fresh annoyance: “You see, Kristoff had all the advantages and opportunities in life he could wish for – and yet what did they avail him? He might as well have sung nursery rhymes and counted beans with these miniature peasants! Yet, I am not totally lacking in parental feeling – he is only in exile, and I will permit him to try again.” 

“You should write a book, Victor.” She lifts her hands in a framing gesture. “ _Raising Children The Doom Way_. Subtitle: _Tough Love and the Dictators of Tomorrow_.”

“You are mocking me.”

“Well, I try not to Victor, but you do make it very easy sometimes.” She gestures at the playing children and then up to the old city on the hill. “I’m just saying: children... schools. It seems like an obvious combination.”

“How would it benefit them? What good is learning to them while they pull turnips in a field?”

“You could mechanize this country – with clean energy, even. Your people don’t need to be subsistence farmers. Instead of thinking of them as livestock – to be pacified and subdued – you could think of them as a creative and intellectual resource.”

“Oh yes, that is the Richards way, is it not? Everyone will be sanitized, mechanized and optimized, and the world will run as silently and smoothly as a digital clock. You think I am cruel to my people – that I _deny_ them – I rather think I am merciful. Knowledge is unhappiness, it is discontent. You said as much yourself, Valeria.” 

“Maybe it is – but I wouldn’t un-choose it, and neither would you.” She watches a group of children who have made a game of chasing one another between two trees and shrieking with a hysteria pitched somewhere between anxiety and delight. Touching the trunks makes you ‘safe’, she gathers: but if you are caught you become a chaser rather than a chasee. “You know what I think, Victor? I think that deep down you believe that only someone very ignorant and afraid could love you.”

“Doom does not require, or crave love. Not from his subjects – not from anyone. Do not presume to impose such half-baked psychoanalytic drivel on me.” 

“You loved Valeria, didn’t you? I know you – more than you like to admit – and you’re weirdly sentimental in unexpected ways. You named me because you loved her, and you wanted to honor her memory. So what happened to her?”

“She died. Obviously.”

“Does it balance, then? You saved my life and gave me her name.” Valeria tilts her head to one side thoughtfully. “Did you plan this – that I would be your lover one day? Did you design me as a replacement?”

Doom’s voice vibrates against the mask in his tightly-controlled fury. “You can have no conception of how deeply that disgusting accusation offends me. You could never replace her – she was an angel, and your superior in every way. I will not listen to these casual, impertinent speculations!”

“I think I have a right–”

He raises his hand in command. “Silence! You forget that in Latveria, people have only those rights I deign to give them. Do not speak of anything further. You are ruining Children’s Day.” With that, Victor rises and strides off into the trees. 

Valeria sighs and says every Hungarian swear word she knows (which is three of them). After the elapse of a few minutes a child’s voice startles her out of her dark reflections. “Why is master baron angry?”

Valeria blinks at the child. “Hello, Marek.” 

“I’m Marja – Marek is my brother.”

“Oh,” Valeria blinks – under the orphanage’s standard-issue bowl cut she sees that the familiar face is subtly rounder and more feminine. “I didn’t know any of you spoke English.”

“Yes, our father was English. We don’t speak it around the others – here it is better to be ordinary, I think.” She rolls her large, thoughtful eyes. Valeria thinks Marja and Marek might be very odd children, but really she has no benchmark for comparison when it comes to ‘normal’. “Why is the baron angry? He has gone back up to the castle and we haven’t even done our dance for him yet. The mothers are worried.”

“You can tell them not to worry about it – he’s only angry with me.”

Marja twists a lock of her dark hair around her finger and does a little spin, pulling the side of her shorts out as if its the hem of a dress. “Aren’t you frightened he’ll kill you?”

“No, I’m not frightened he’ll – later the baron will calm down and I’ll apologise. It’ll be fine, I promise.”

The girl bites her lip and frowns thoughtfully. “Then are you special? Marek says you say you’re not, but he thinks you were telling a fib.”

“Everyone’s special, aren’t they?” Valeria replies evasively.

“No.” The little girl says. “We’re all the same, look. Same hair, same clothes. We know the same dances and songs, and that’s all.”

“But you and Marek know English,” Valeria says. “And you know there’s a world beyond Latveria.”

Marja nods. “I remember books and computers. Mama had a phone she would let us play games on, or talk to our dad. We don’t tell the others though. They wouldn’t understand, and if they did it would make them hate us.”

Valeria leans forwards and shades her eyes with her hand against the afternoon light. “You’re very clever, aren’t you – even when you try not to be?” 

The girl shakes her head from side to side resolutely. “I don’t understand,” she says in Hungarian.

“I’m pretty sure that’s a fib, but never mind.” Valeria stands up and holds out her hand to Marja. “Come on, why don’t you all show me your dance. I’ll tell the baron all about it later.”

The girl skips along at her side and hums a tune – a three-year-old pop song. 

*~*~*

It is not hard to find Victor when she returns to the castle. Valeria pauses in the doorway and watches him – it is extraordinary, how well-articulated his gauntlets are. He can play a the rapid, trilling notes of a piano sonata while still wearing them. 

“I know you are there,” he says, not breaking off from the music, but rather doing unnecessary violence to the chords of the crescendo. 

“I am sorry I ruined Children’s Day,” she tells him. “Can I come in?”

“You may make yourself useful and turn the music.”

She slides onto the bench and waits until he finishes the last few bars of his current sheet before turning the leaf. It is companionable enough, listening to Victor play – he is a talented but rather erratic musician; his tempo is always just a shade off and she does not care for Wagner. Eventually, he runs out of pages and the instrument falls silent; he withdraws his hands and rests them on his knees, upright and still like an egyptian block statue.

Valeria reaches out and places her fingers on the keyboard, not playing, but tapping her fingernails lightly on the ivory keys of the vintage Bösendorfer grand (no-one could ever accuse Doom of not knowing how to live well). “Do you remember that time you tried to give me a lesson on this?”

“Dimly. What were you, ten years old?”

“Something like that.” She slowly picks out a series of notes, climbing up the C major scale and then down again. “I thought I was really good – I was three whole grades ahead of Franklin.” As if to demonstrate she launches into the first movement of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’. Although Valeria has not touched an instrument in years, the melody rises obediently from the depths of her memory and the music flows from her fingertips at its sedate, mournful pace. She plays for a full minute, then abruptly breaks off mid-bar.

“Very pretty,” Victor pronounces, with more than a hint of condescension in his tone.

“That day my playing was perfect, not a note wrong. I was very pleased with myself, as well I might be – I thought you would offer me some little snippet of praise. You listened with every appearance of patience and when the piece was finished you unfolded your arms and announced that it was clearly not worth your time to teach me.”

“Did I?” Victor chuckles.

“Mmm. You just glared down at me and pronounced my playing ‘clinical’, ‘passionless’. You told me that however much I practiced I would never be a great musician. Essentially, you went on to say, I ‘lacked the soul of an artist’.”

Victor turns his head to look at her. “And what effect did my candor have upon your young psyche? Were you angry? Upset?”

She smiles, shakes her head. “I was pleased.” 

Victor makes a sound of surprise. “Why?”

“Well, I was starting to become genuinely concerned that I was brilliant at everything. All I got at home was all limitless possibility and boundless imagination – and here you were saying ‘no. You can’t do that.’ And that was something, you know. Some boundary I could use to define myself. ‘Not a musician.’ It was liberating, almost.”

“That... makes no sense.”

“Not to you, maybe.” 

“You are beyond my understanding, Valeria,” he says, absently, rising from the piano bench and crossing to the huge fireplace where a spruce log crackles on the andirons. He grasps the mantlepiece with one hand and looks up to the painting that hangs above it. It is the portrait of Cynthia von Doom, who gazes out of the frame with a haughty, angry expression and something indefinably sad in her eyes. Valeria rises to join him, to look up at the painting from his perspective and see what he sees.

“Did you paint that yourself, Victor?” she asks, a sudden flash of insight.

“I did.”

“From memory?”

He nods. “I cannot clearly remember my father’s face, although I knew him much longer. He was a good enough man, in his own way, but he was nothing to her. I fancy he rather feared her than loved her.”

“She was very beautiful, though, he must have loved her for that.”

“Beauty is a bait, ‘on purpose laid to make the taker mad,’ is it not how the bard has it?”

“He was talking about lust, not beauty.”

Victor makes a sound of indignation – whether at her choice of word, or the presumption of correcting him, she cannot say. 

“My mother,” he says with dignity, “was by far the most beautiful of our tribe – perhaps there were men who would have thought her a prize, and so to save herself from that ignominious fate, she married my father, who was humble, learned and virtuous.”

“What is the moral of this story – that a person should only shackle themselves to another to avoid worser fates?”

Victor turns to look at her. “There is no moral to this story, or any other. It is merely a collection of facts pertaining to the past.”

“How do you know how your parents felt about one another?” she presses. “Did your dad tell you?”

“He did not. He seldom spoke of her after she died.”

“Then it’s just an impression, right? You’re piecing together fuzzy memories and drawing inferences.”

“Doom does not _infer_. Doom knows.” 

“Yeah, but...” she holds up her hands. “You know what – I’m doing that thing again.”

“Being impertinent?”

She sighs. “It’s not like it’s on purpose. Whether either of us likes to admit it or not, I am very like my dad. He’s always pushing people’s buttons, too – without even realising, or meaning to. Endless questions and theories and insensitive remarks....” She pauses and links her arm around his elbow, drumming her fingers on the plate covering his forearm. “I love you. That was what I was trying to say earlier – I don’t think I did, though.” She breathes out heavily. “I wanted to be better at this, when it was you. I thought perhaps you could teach yourself to be good at this kind of thing.”

He looks down at her. “What are you talking about?”

“Oh, you’re not following – should I stop?”

“No, _explain_.”

“Well, I thought that I could learn to be good at being someone’s lover. Holistically, not just physically. Because my parents have been together for years and they are still so bad at it sometimes, it’s not even funny. I didn’t want it to be that way with you. It’s tedious, for one thing – having the same arguments over and over. Let’s not do that, agreed?” 

“What is it that makes you so sure that this – that you and I, are even capable of any kind of sustained intimacy? As you might have gathered, I am not amenable to sharing my thoughts – or my space – with another.” She can hear his suspicion, feel the paranoid villain in him warring with the part that is human and wants all the trimmings of comfort.

“I’m not sure – I don’t think that’s how it works. You will just have to become more comfortable living with uncertainty, Victor. Though, I am willing to predict it’ll be fine.”

“On the contrary, it seems highly unlikely to succeed,” he says, taking a step back from her and crossing his arms. 

“Crazier things have happened. We do six impossible things before breakfast in the Future Foundation.” She moves to the table and pulls the stopper from a grotesquely ornate decanter to pour out a goblet of wine, then turns back to hand it to him. Victor gazes at the contents for a moment before drinking down half the glass. “You know,” Valeria continues, pouring herself a drink next, “Uncle Johnny said something to me a while back, that made an impression... It was round Christmas – I guess maybe he was drunk. He always gets weird around the holidays.” She pauses to take a sip of the Latverian red. “He said: ‘don’t be afraid of letting someone close. You can always be alone.’ That doesn’t sound very profound, I know. It was the way he said it... ‘you can always be alone.’” 

Victor taps his fingertip against the rim of the goblet. “Jonathan Storm is hardly what I would describe as the fount of wisdom.”

“No,” she agrees. “Maybe that’s the point. Look, I know you don’t really do compromise, and I guess mostly that’s ok. It’s not like I’m going to be here all the time – not even most of the time. I have projects and Future Foundation curriculum stuff to work on – oh, and dad just said he wants me to go collect samples with him back in the Lower Paleolithic–”

“Valeria.”

“Yeah,” she snaps back out of her ever-revolving plans, “so I have things going on and so do you. We’re not going to move to the suburbs, grow roses and do the crossword together, I get that. But I want someone I know is mine alone, someone to trust.” 

“You realise that I in selecting me for this office, you have made a very poor choice?”

“It has to be you.”

“Why? There are literally millions of men in this world who are more eligible than I – _kind_ , _trustworthy_ people,” for all he is ostensibly trying to sell the idea, Victor’s voice drips with disdain. 

“Yeah well, I’m coming to terms with the idea that maybe I’m not a very nice person. Because you can be nice, or you can be _right_ – you can’t be both.”

Victor makes a sound that is somewhere between amusement and satisfaction at this, then he pauses, gazing out at her through the apertures in the mask with a look of intense scrutiny. “You’ve never been afraid of me, Valeria. Why is that? Is it because you have always had the arrogance to think you could outwit me, or the complacency to believe I could never bring myself to harm you?”

“Perhaps it’s a bit of both. You’ve always been good to me, Victor – in your own way. In ways I needed, when no-one else was.”

“Just because something has been the case does not guarantee its continuance. Others have made the presumptuous mistake of trusting to my affections in the past, and they have generally not lived long enough to regret it.”

“Is that what you’re afraid of – that you would hurt me?” 

“Doom is afraid of nothing!” he snaps. “It is you who should be afraid. Why don’t you ever heed what anyone tells you? You dismiss your family’s care and concern for you and willfully misunderstand it as contempt. You, who are one small, fragile body at the centre of a storm of godlike powers – whose life could be extinguished at any moment by one stray blow – and you have the gall to resent that they fear for you? And now you go to bed with a supervillain and let him put his killing hands all over your soft, vulnerable flesh. Why, Valeria?”

“It’s not my fault the world is dangerous. Just to live as a woman is to be under threat, to be a liability.” 

“Be rational! There are _degrees_ of risk.”

“Possibilities always frighten you, Victor. That’s why your plans are so incredibly, neurotically complex. You want the truth as to why I’m not afraid of you? It’s _because_ I have no powers – there’s nothing you could take from me, and you have nothing to gain by my death. That, and because you once promised me protection – and whatever else you are, I do believe you’re a man of your word.”

“And the fact you are reasonably sure I would never murder you is what makes me an appropriate candidate for a soul mate, in your view?” 

She sighs. “Would it make you more comfortable if you thought of this as an alliance – subject, of course, to mutually agreed upon terms and conditions?”

He glances at her sidelong. “You are proposing – what? That we negotiate the definition and boundaries of a love affair?”

“I think it would make it easier for you if we did – you like frameworks. You like having boundaries to meddle with.”

“Do I?” he asks, a hint of bitterness in his tone beneath the wry amusement.

“You know you do.” Valeria takes a seat and crosses one leg over the other. “So go on, tell me what you want and persuade me to agree.”

“You wish for me to set the terms?”

“Yes. By all means proceed, Doctor.”

Victor gazes into the fire and then turns, sweeping back his cloak as he clasps his hands behind his back. “First, you are mine alone, Valeria. No man – or woman, neither – shall know you intimately; in terms physical or emotional.”

“I love how you think in sub-clauses, Victor, I really do.”

“Second, you inform your family of the true nature of our relationship. I will not pretend to be your godfatherly friend simply to spare the blushes of the Fantastic Four. What the general public knows or speculates in this respect is of no interest to me. 

“Third, you do not interfere in any schemes or business in which I have, or may have, an interest. I will extend to you the same courtesy – and thus you may take this as proof against any current global or universal ambitions. If there are enterprises which we deem to be mutually beneficial, then we may act cooperatively, but only upon prior consultation.

“Fourth, you will visit Latveria no fewer than three times each calendar year and claim it as your nation of domicile. Fifth, You will apply for a Latverian passport under dual citizenship. Sixth, You will learn enough of our dialect of Hungarian as to not be an embarrassment to me before the citizens. I do not require that you learn Romanian or Vlax Romani, as you will be accompanied by me in any interaction with those peoples. Seventh, you will accept my judgement in all matters pertaining to the governance of Latveria and its people, though I may solicit your counsel, and you may offer it. Eighth, all guests you bring to the country are subject to my approval, upon the understanding I will grant this freely unless there are serious objections.”

“And my family, for instance?”

“I would grant my hospitality – as long as they have been informed of the third item of our understanding, and that I hold _you_ entirely responsible for their actions in Latveria.”

“Is that it?”

Victor thinks for a moment. “Ninth, you do not appropriate my resources, or interfere in my experiments, unless explicitly invited by me to do the same.”

“I think that’s covered, in spirit, under item three.”

“Well, then that is all.”

“Sounds reasonable.”

“Have _you_ anything to add?”

“Let’s see... Tenth – are we still counting? Ok, Tenth, this agreement ends when either, or both of us, formally states that it does, with no recrimination; it may also be amended, or added to by mutual consent. Eleventh, we each treat the other with courtesy and consideration in all our interactions.”

“I am offended you have conceived of a scenario in which we do otherwise. Doom, it is well known, is the most courteous of princes, and has written many conduct manuals on the subject.” 

Valeria rolls her eyes. “That one is mainly for me, then.”

“What next, no hair-pulling or name-calling?”

“I’m not opposed to a little hair-pulling and name-calling under very specific circumstances–”

“Valeria, please confine your obscene fantasies to the bedroom.”

“Fine. Twelfthly, and lastly, you show me your face.”

“That is not a matter for flippant negotiation.”

“You started it,” she says, placidly. “Note, I did not specify a time or place. At some future time – perhaps even a distant one. Whenever you feel comfortable, Victor.”

“And if that is _never_?”

“It will just have to be sometime, that’s all.”

“Why?”

“Why do I want to see my lover’s face?”

“Why frame it as a demand, taking away all choice or intimacy in the matter?”

Valeria sighs and taps the chair arm agitatedly before rising from her seat. “Alright, that’s a fair objection. Twelve is stricken. Eleven makes it a nice prime number.” She offers him her hand. “Agreed?”

Victor nods and envelops her fingers with his own. “Agreed.” 

They clink their glasses together and drink to it. “Well,” he asks, “what now?”

She gestures towards the piano. “Play something for me, Victor. Something beautiful.”

“Let me see,” he says, “if memory serves, you enjoy the preludes of Debussy. Insufficiently rousing for my tastes, but acceptable.”

As he sits down to play she moves to stand behind him, loosely linking her arms around his neck. She leans down and smothers her smile of triumph in the back of his cloak, feeling the shifts in his shoulders beneath the armor as his hands fly over the keys.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No updates in ages then two in one week! That’s how I roll, apparently, because I write everything out of sequence. 
> 
> Things that are delightfully canon: Doom plays the piano! Doom paints (mostly pictures of himself)! Doom loves and is beloved of tiny, adorable children! He is truly a Renaissance man.


End file.
